Scared to update

HI there,

I am concerned that if I update our system it may crash. I have recently experienced this on another computer system and although it was not running Fedora (it was Solus), it broke the system.

I know it was the drivers for the video card that caused this. Is there anyway to delay the GPU driver update or bypass this part of the update?

Not sure if my old video card needs an update anyway.

System:
ddddd-11-07

You can use the dnf update method and exclude the video driver as follows

sudo dnf upgrade --exclude=nvidia*

For more info, see: DNF Command Reference — dnf latest documentation

How did you install the nvidia driver?

You can also permanently disable updates for certain packages (in dnf.conf), however, I would not recommend doing so.

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Great thanks a lot,

Is there anyway to do the complete update but if it damages it I can rollback easily in grub?

I have other options in grub

Rollback in grub is a different beast. For that you would need to take a snapshot of your system before upgrading. This can be done on systems with btrfs file systems, see Rollback Btrfs root snapshot and Fedora 30 the SUSE way - Snapper Rollback Btrfs · GitHub.

For now, what you could do is sudo dnf undo history last to undo the last dnf command.

?

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I installed it using the terminal from the rpm fusion repo

Okay so I beleive I have that type of filesystem

see below

So would timeshift be an alternative ?

(edit)

ah I see according to what I found timeshift won’t really work with BTRFS filesystem.

I think maybe snapper to back it up?

Timeshift itself is just a backup tool (does incremental backups).
What you need as well is something that takes a backup before running the dnf upgrade commmand and something that creates a grub entry for restoring those backups.

The first one could be snapper plugin as you mentioned or Timeshift itself (GitHub - wmutschl/timeshift-autosnap-apt: Timeshift auto-snapshot script for Ubuntu and Debian based systems which creates snapshots of your system with timeshift before a package install, remove or upgrade using DPkg::Pre-Invoke hook in apt. Fork of timeshift-autosnap from AUR.) but this may not be ready for Fedora yet. Here is a good read of the dev of Timeshift: Willi Mutschler

Second one is grub-btrfs: GitHub - Antynea/grub-btrfs: Include btrfs snapshots at boot options. (Grub menu)

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Hi there, I went into the developers github site and tried to get some help installing this and it seems they are busy with work at the moment.

I was hoping you may have installed this and could offer some guidance

Rpm Fusion nvidia drivers I have been updating for years and they are fine ! RPM fusion offers great stable drivers and won’t land if they are unstable. I am currently using latest ones from RPm Fusion and that too with Optimus setting primary drivers to be these nvidia ones ! But still if you think its risky you can exclude them from updating :slight_smile:

Hi there,

Just wondering how do we find out what kinds of nvidia drivers we have installed. like open source or proprietary,

EDIT

Ah I have this output…

When it crashed last time I updated the GPU drivers I was running linux mint, then it crashed again running solus, now for half a year i’ve been running fedora with no problems. It’s a very old GPU as you can see.

If “lsmod | grep nvidia” shows more than a single line then the proprietary nvidia drivers are in use. OTOH if “lsmod | grep nouveau” shows several lines then the open source nouveau drivers are in use.

What you posted there shows the nvidia driver version 460.39 in use.

Yes indeed it seems its nvidia drivers, thanks.

A quick question, I dont get it though, nvidia is still building updates for these old video cards? this is extremely old (released 2012).

That card is supported by the current driver so until nvidia changes that driver, then yes, you will still get updates. As long as you stay on fedora and use the rpmfusion repo the updates will be available.

Infact, Its listed on Howto/NVIDIA - RPM Fusion that

This driver is suitable for any GPU found in 2012 and later.

So no worries :slight_smile: Your card is supported by the latest driver versions.

Gefore 400/500 have Nvidia driver version 390.x in rpm fusion

Older ones 8/9/200/300 have 340.x driver version.

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