My Predator Helos laptop has two video cards, one intel for low power consumption and one Nvidia 1660 Ti for gaming.
I tried to use Optimus with bbswitch to switch between cards on demand automatically. When installing the bbswitch package it also installed the 4.9 lts kernel.
Upon reboot I just get a blank screen with a blinking curser in the top left corner. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del then waiting several seconds it will reboot after it times out. To get to the Solus boot screen press the space bar repeatedly on boot (might have to try again to get it right) then select the working 5.6 kernel.
To make it easier use clr-boot-manager to add a 3 second delay to the boot menu with:
sudo clr-boot-manager set-timeout 3
So I remove the bbswitch package and 4.9 lts kernel, however the 4.9 lts entry is still in the boot menu and trying to load.
Using clr-boot-manager update will not remove the unused 4.9 entry.
After going through most of the Google links for this problem I finally found a fix on the Solus Help Center.
Find your EFI partition with:
sudo fdisk -o Device,Size,Type -l /dev/sda
The output should look similar to below:
Disk /dev/sda: 465.8 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Disk model: WDC WDS500G2B0B
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 605F1A5F-1387-4015-A955-F8D4A1C3C2BE
Device Size Type
/dev/sda1 488.3M EFI System
/dev/sda2 3.7G Linux swap
/dev/sda3 461.6G Linux filesystem
Now mount the EFI partition with the commands below (adjust /dev/sda1 for your system):
sudo su
cd / && mkdir /target
mount /dev/sda1 /target
Now to delete the boot entry with the below commands:
cd /target/EFI/loader/entries mv Solus-lts-4.9.223-158.conf /home/user/ cd / umount /dev/sda1
This will move the unused entry to be deleted later if not needed. Once you reboot into the 5.6 kernel with no problems set the timeout back to 0.
I installed the propriety Nvidia drivers through Solus software center and the Nvidia card is used all the time. You can check with:
glxgears -info
You should see something like:
GL_RENDERER = GeForce GTX 1660 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
GL_VERSION = 4.6.0 NVIDIA 440.82
GL_VENDOR = NVIDIA Corporation
