Hello again,

I wish to apologize for starting to receive your help back in November, and then disappearing for months.  The reason for disappearing was medical issues (not COVID or COVID related) which I will just have to deal with.

Moving forward, I found that there are problems with the NVidia drivers and for me, trying more with the NVidia card is not worth it.  Fortunately, there is an Intel video chip i915 on the motherboard, so I decided to use that instead of the NVidia card.  I removed the NVidia video drivers and the nouveau drivers through yast.  But, I still have problems.

Symptoms:

Cold boot screens:
1. Grub screen--looks and works fine

2. Next screen  says "Loading" and works fine.

3. Third screen is the expected grey color.  3 visual green progress bars scroll across the center of the screen---BUT!!!!  PROBLEM???  3 visual green "artifact" bars appear at the top left side of the screen after a couple of seconds.  (this is my first indication that all is not right)

4. Then the login screen appears, and I can login.

My graphical desktop appears....but after a while, the cooling fans on the video card and the power supply spin loudly at what I assume to be maximum speed and the computer is frozen.  Holding the power button (or probably pulling the plug, which I did not try)is the only thing that will shut the system down.

Next, I logged in as root and ran
# lsmod | grep nouveau

and I found that the nouveau module is still loading...and I'm wondering if that is the problem?

I have never, when using linux, have I run into this type of problem before, but I have it now.  Here is the output from:

# lsmod | grep nouveau

nouveau               225686     2
mxm_wmi              16384     1    nouveau

ttm                       118784     1    nouveau

i2c_algo_bit          16384      2    i915,nouveau

drm_kms_helper  2621144  2    i915,nouveau

drm                       614400   7    drm_kms_helper, i195,ttm,nouveau

wmi                       36884     7    dell_wmi, dwll_wmi_aio,wmi_bmof,  <cont next line> dell_smbios,dell_wmi_descriptor, msm_wmi,nouveau

video                     53248     3    dell_wmi,i915,nouveau

button                    24576     1     nouveau

#

And here is what is in the software management "section" of Yast"

  i  |libdrm_noveau2    |Userspace interface for kernel DRM services for NVIDIA chips  2.4.104  |

note: other lines refer to nouveau, but those lines show as not installed. (no "i" in the last column)

Granted, I have made assumptions, so I'm not sure if the above helps or not. And I am stumped as to how to proceed.  Would someone please help me get this system stable and working properly? I'm guessing that it is the nouveau module that is causing the problems, but I'm not sure.  If it is the source of the crashes, what should I do to stop nouveau from getting loaded?

If the problem is not nouveau, what should I run to get more diagnostic information?  Needless to say, my goal is a stable, graphical KDE environment.

Thank you so very much,

Mark