Fedora 14 on HP 8440p

By Fabian Stanke in Fedora — 3. Nov. 2010

The new version of Fedora is out since yesterday and available for download.

Naturally, my private notebook is the first place for me to perform the upgrade. Although the new Nouveau driver detects the resolution (1600×900) and runs just fine, I really want fully accelerated graphics and for that purpose still have to resort to the proprietary drivers from NVIDIA to use the NVS 3100M card in my HP EliteBook 8440p. Not the least reason for this is, that I love GNOME Shell which requires accelerated graphics.

Here is a summary specifically for the 8440p with a resolution of 1600×900. (as root):

yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
yum update
yum install kmod-nvidia

Reboot

nvidia-settings -r

Verify, that Xorg is configured to use the proprietary driver. A minimal /etc/X11/xorg.conf should look like this:

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
EndSection

Finally, since the driver doesn’t support Kernel Mode-Setting (KMS), open the Grub configuration at /boot/grub/grub.conf and append the following parameter to the kernel configuration (behind rdblacklist=nouveau): vga=0x34D.

Update (2011-02-28): To make the video wake up properly after suspend to RAM (sleep), add the following kernel parameter: acpi_sleep=nonvs.