When I decided to switch to using Linux as my primary OS I had Artix and Debian dreams (personal and work/enterprise) but the refurb dell 5420 rugged I got had other ideas… Tried many distros and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS was the only one that worked without nomodeset. (Funnily enough that’s the version Dell officially supports who would have thought…)
Guess I now have a year to figure out how to get these darn Intel GPU drivers to work on an up to date distro before I stop getting security patches…
(Still gonna run KDE tho)
My business VPSs are running Debian with windows server VMs and this laptop’s main purpose is gonna be SSH connections to those anyway but still.
If nomodeset is your only issue you can also edit the grub auto-configuration script, and make it add nomodeset permanently (at least until the next update…) It might be a better option than trying to use software that is so old!
That’s specifically what I’m trying to not do tho. I did permanently add it to the grub scrip on the distros I tried but losing hardware acceleration and display brightness control on a super bright screen wasn’t ideal.
Ah sorry to hear. A year ago I had to disable kernel modesetting to make the nvidia drivers work for me, but I did not lose hardware acceleration, so I thought modesetting was optional for the drivers.
Your experience though sounds like the driver fails to load entirely, and the kernel switches to the standard VESA drivers, which are not really usable. Maybe it’s the VESA drivers not being compatible with modesetting, or they set a weird resolution/refresh rate not supported by the actual panel?
Best of luck!
that’s a bit weird, but if it’s really the only version that works, you can take its ancient kernel and pair it with a recent distro.
intel gpu drivers tend to work pretty well though, so it’s really strange.
i have many machines ranging from intel core i 2nd~7th gen (and igpu), they all work well… never had issues
I was tempted to say it was a hardware issue until I tried 18.04 and it worked flawlessly. I guess having it be a certified version does mean something.
I do require CVE patches on this machine so using the old kernel past EOL/ESM isn’t really an option. I might have to see if it’s possible to extract only the required drivers.
uhh i just tried searching and your i5-8350U is a Kaby Lake Refresh actually, so it’s more like a 7th gen… and it has UHD Graphics 620.
i have two laptops with very similar gpu. one HD Graphics 615 (i5-7y57) and one HD Graphics 630 (i5-7300HQ). according to techpowerup these gpus seem to be all very similar, based on Kaby Lake GT2.
those two laptops are all running Slackware 15.0 (Linux 5.15) flawlessly. i suggest you try this distro/version just in case. it’s a bit old but still the latest version and receiving security updates.
or maybe, the recent distros you tried are using Wayland instead of X11? i’m using Xorg X11 on all my systems.
if your machine somehow really just works with an older kernel, maybe try checking if some version used on RHEL/Rocky or CIP SLTS works well.
Have you had any success updating your glibc to 2.34 or higher. Slackware 15 is baked into 2.33 which was unfortunately the last version that with that directory hierarchy causing a some breakage.
I tried dropping it into /opt and adding that to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH but that just causes segmentation faults
i haven’t done it, but i heard there’s a newer glibc in /extra and it just works… i think you might get better help from LQ or irc.
Weird. I recently installed the modern KDE version of fedora 44 to an old Dell core 2 duo laptop from 2007-8. Installed just fine. It has no business running it however. Far too heavy. If I’m looking at the right one this is a decadish newer laptop?! Must be some odd bit of proprietaryness getting in the way. Not unheard of with dell or HP.
Yep. Intel i5-8350U from 2017 in this case.
Seems like a fairly common issue that I can’t find a solution to. Intel iGPUs around that generation just not playing nice with the newer drivers so you have to add “nomodeset” in grub to bypass them. But then you’re stuck not being able to adjust display brightness (horrible when you have a sunlight readable display glowing with the power of a thousand suns) or run anything that requires a gpu. (Tried accessing my foundryVTT instance and got 1fps and web videos would barely decode at all) everything else pretty much worked fine if you ignored all the boot errors lol (without nomodeset in grub the OS crashes within minutes if not seconds)
I’m sure there’s a way to make it work but that’s a future me problem. I just needed a rugged thin client since I can’t rely on local hardware on a sailboat anyway.
What is the procedure for running antique hardware on a modern distro?
Often you just need to install it. If it’s a really really old system then pick something that is minimal or designed to be lightweight. In the old times something like xubuntu would do the trick, but nowadays I don’t know what’s out there.
You can also try some more “heavy” distros. I have a 2014 macbook air (4GB of RAM), with full gnome 3 and it works really really smoothly. If you have some money to spend, adding a small ssd, even with adapters, will make a whole lot of difference.
If the drivers have been removed from the kernel, you’ll need to find a more “antique” distro too, or go deep into customization (I can tell you more if you want, do ask!)
Let’s say the computer you want to use is only supported in an older kernel – do some of those get back-ported security patches, or to you need to air gap it from the internet?
Depends on your risk model. To simplify my point of view: risk = severity * likelyhood. If it’s unlikely and relatively nonconsequential to overcome, it’s still low risk.
There is a world where running an old kernel and latest firefox gets you hacked, say maybe buggy GPU drivers with a really really bad opengl vulnerability?. I think it’s quite unlikely. Like what hacker targets your weird GPU driver several years out of date?
I think it’s much more likely your few-days-outdated LTS version of firefox gets hacked instead, because even if you have an old and fully supported distro, updates are often a bit more delayed (backporting patches takes still some time from maintainers). LTS distro maintainers also do choose what bugs and vulnerability get backported or not, and not everything crosses the line.
If you do things like accessing your bank with your life savings or your crypto wallet then please do get a more modern distro and live with the hardware incompatibilities. If you use it to browse facebook and the news, read emails and write some random documents, there’s not much there to steal for a hacker anyway.
IMHO just the fact you are not running windows and are on the latest version of the software means you’ll be all fine, for many, many years, even with an old, unsupported kernel. Your old pc will probably die before a hacker gets in.
If you have compliance requirements from your company… get your company to buy you a better, more modern pc please. Like, wtf, that thing has probably hardware and firmware vulnerabilities too!
That’s exactly what I’ll have to figure out! Either that or find room in my budget for a newer rugged laptop.
Best of luck! I suspect you’ll have to find out which kernels support your hardware, but the other commenter seems to know more!
Ubuntu 18 is long EOL
Still getting security patches till May with the ESM program. https://ubuntu.com/security/esm
Never mind
