Who said Gentoo cannot be tweaked to run the Nvidia 390 driver for my GT430 card!! Very much more stable than the nouveau driver!!
The basis of your problem is that at about kernel 5.19 the api for kernel modules changed. That required card makers to update their drivers. Nvidia decided not to upgrage a whole range of drivers for older cards. I had one of their older cards too . I tried tricks like yours, but eventually gave up and purchased a new AMD card. Have had no issues with the AMD card.
The other solution you have is run an older kernel and use the original card driver …it will work with an old kernel. antiX offers old kernels.
That is not quite the whole story, when it comes to Gentoo!! The trouble it takes to get the driver unmasked has been well worth it, and has really given the old Dell machine a new life!!
I dont understand.
You cant be talking about normal masking of packages?
Let’s just say there is a lot more under the hood with Gentoo, if one wishes to explore!! Unmasking a global mask, like the, Nvidia 390 driver, can take a little time!! Most distros just default to the nouveau driver, which struggles to drive anything, especially my GT430 GPU!!
I did the same thing on my main rig a few years ago, after years of frustration with NVIDIA. I’ve yet to encounter a single problem with AMD. It’s been a great experience so far. Still, I’m impressed at anyone who can get a near two decade old computer going these days, especially with all of the recent architecture deprecations and hardware exclusions by manufacturers and projects.
That is good advice for anyone buying a computer for linux.
Intel onboard graphics is usually OK too.
Yes that will work and is the easy way out!! Problem is, my Dell Inspiron 530, also runs Windows XP, and uses the GT430, and some games I bought, back in the XP era, will not run on AMD!! So if XP can run Nvidia, then why cannot Linux, and Gentoo provides the way, to accomplish my project!! So yes, Gentoo runs the Nvidia GT430, but it is a very much so, a locked-down Gentoo, but this has provided a very stable environment for the old Dell machine!! I am very pleased with Gentoo running on this machine!!
I hope it lasts as long as it can. One of the downsides of the kernel team and many of these distributions is that they are depracating older hardware of late. I hate seeing it because it was always one of the advertisements for using Linux. Still, at some point, it’s going to run up against those newer kernels, from what I’ve been reading over the past several months (with the old Pentiums being recent victims, which I used into the 2010s). I’ve never tested Gentoo on an older computer, but it would make sense that it would be malleable for older hardware, assuming the maker and kernel allow it to happen. I love seeing older computers getting used, and it bugs me to no end that Linux is moving down the road of phasing out support (when organizations like The Linux Foundation have more than enough resources to maintain said support).
I run Gentoo also and my Nvidia GPU is GTX 1060 3GB, CPU Intel i5-3470. When Nvidia dropped their support for my GPU all I needed to do was add this line to me /etc/portage/package.mask/nvidia file:
>=x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-595
My kernel is 6.18.50 at the moment
Yes I am aware of all you said and the kernel is locked at “6.1.188-gentoo-dist-bin” which is a LTS kernel and the last kernel the Nvidia-390 driver will write too, all newer kernels have been masked!! Maybe later on I will take the time and use a gentoo-sources kernel and compile one for this machine!! Yes it is getting to that Linux has to have about the same hardware to run, the same as Windows!! As for the machine, it will run as long as it can!!
Yes that GPU and driver falls into a different bracket, than the old Nvidia-390, I think!!