Problem with old Dell Precision laptop

Laptop Precision M90, that had been in storage for 10 years.

A use for the laptop came up.

The laptop boots, but some characters are garbage in the bios menu. Also there are a bunch of purple/green dots on the screen. Anyway, after it booted to the old linux/windows install, the screen appeared fine. I am planning to change the hard drive and do a current os install. To test, I booted off a linux mint 19.1 mate edition 32 bit usb drive, the screen is garbled. When I do CTRL+ALT+F2 and then switch back to the graphic console, the screen is fine for half a second, and then it again becomes garbled.

I was able to get to an ungarbled screen (but with the screen dots) by booting in compatibility mode from the usb stick, but then the screen is at a lower resolution, the 1080p option is not there in displays. If I go to the manage drivers menu, it says no proprietary drivers in use. I installed the NVIDIA module from synaptic, still it remains the same.

I am guessing there is something wrong with the integrated GPU module and thats why some characters are garbled in the bios menu. The NVIDIA Quadro FX1500 gpu when it becomes active, makes the screen fine (as evidenced by the screen becoming fine when booted to the old existing OSs, but the linux mint install cannot seem to find it.

Any solutions?

 

Try booting with nomodeset as a kernel parameter for both your installer and for your first boot after you install your system prior to getting the Nvidia driver installed. Proprietary drivers may work for you after rebooting, but since rebooting a live OS any changes, you'll have to do that after installing.

If you're unfamiliar with changing kernel boot parameters, here's a link.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/KernelBootParameters

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After installing and rebooting (with nomodeset), still the driver management tool says no drivers in use.

The support list for the current NVIDIA drivers do not seem to include the FX 1500M card. I had to go to the NVIDIA archive and there I see something which has the card in the support list.

Here is the output of inxi -Fxz

Code:

Graphics:

Device-1: NVIDIA G71GLM [Quadro FX 1500M] vendor: Dell driver: N/A

bus ID: 01:00.0

Display: server: X.Org 1.19.6 driver: vesa resolution: 1280x1024~61Hz

OpenGL: renderer: llvmpipe (LLVM 8.0 128 bits) v: 3.3 Mesa 19.0.2

direct render: Yes

 

Hmm, after reading a bit about your card, and the drivers you need, I'd look into Mint 18.3 if your needs require you to have the proprietary Nvidia driver and higher resolution. 304.137 is the latest driver release that officially supports your card which is deprecated in Mint 19 and also incompatible with many newer kernels. It should still work with 4.10 and under, maybe a version or two later.


I'm curious to see what it takes to get this resolved and am following your post on the other site.

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