Strange Installation Issue

Q&A
1

Hello community.

I am trying to install Clear Linux on my main system after successfully installing it on my secondary workstation.

I am experiencing this strange error upon trying to boot from the Installation Media (USB Driver w/Clear Linux) seen in the attached picture below.

image0%20(1)
image0 (1).jpg4032×3024 1.73 MB

Usually the “nvidiafb” is followed by another error stating: “unknown NV_Arch”, which is strange.

But in the picture above, it seems like the image was frozen before the terminal was able to display that specific line.

The boot process appears to continue as normal in the background but the image is just frozen from that point onwards.

System Specs are:

CPU: Intel Xeon-W 3175X
GPU: NVIDIA TITAN RTX

Where as the secondary workstation I was able to successfully install CL is:

CPU: AMD Ryzen ThreadRipper 2990WX
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080Ti

In order to make some progress in debugging this issue I have installed a spare AMD RX Vega Graphics Card onto my main workstation and CL simply booted as normal, so this is, with almost certainty, an incompatibility issue with the TITAN RTX graphics card specifically, as the 2080Ti boots as normal.

This does not seem like an easy fix, but I am looking forward to getting it resolved so that I can get one more system up and running with CL.

Many thanks!
-Cristiano

2

Please have a look at the other NVIDIA related threads on the forum. Unfortunately, support for really new cards is very spotty, and the upstream nouveau driver is causing a lot of crashes. The binary driver installation also isn’t easy. Sadly, neither problems are something we can really do a lot about.

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3

Thank you. I thought about a workaround in the last couple of days. Might not be as straightforward as simple installing the OS but It could work.

Perhaps replacing the TITAN with another GeForce card, install the NVIDIA Drivers and then put the TITAN back into the system once the Driver is installed.

I will definitely try that out and will report back if it works.

-Cristiano

4

If you want to avoid swapping hardware, you should be able to get to another non-graphical TTY console with CTL +ALT + F4. Alternatively, interrupt the boot and temporarily add modprobe.blacklist=nouveau or systemd.unit=multi-user.target to avoid the graphical glitch by booting without graphics.

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