Nouveau fails to send signal to second monitor via HDMI
When plugging in a second monitor, it receives no signal from the laptop. the system can see and get data about it and also believes it's sending data. i can drag my windows there etc.
lspci -k | grep -A 2 -E "(VGA|3D)"
returns:
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)
Subsystem: Sony Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller
Kernel driver in use: i915
--
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT216M [GeForce GT 330M] (rev a2)
Subsystem: Sony Corporation GT216M [GeForce GT 330M]
Kernel modules: nouveau
xrandr
sees both the HDMI-A-1 monitor and eDP-1 built in laptop monitor
the monitor is fully functional as it works with every other one of my machines
I'm unsure if this happens with other connectors like external display ports, because the laptop only has hdmi support in da motherboard
Happens with: XFCE/KDE Plasma 6 (xorg/wayland) on EndeavourOS and on GNU on Ubuntu
I've been dealing with this over the last two days and i don't even remember everything i tried. I'm using a super old VPCZ126GG with both an NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M and Intel i5 M 540. There's actually no proprietary drivers for this gpu available as it's so old. As a last call i've tried using nvidia-340 drivers but alas, they're not compatible.
Everything on the primary monitor seems to work perfectly. I already tried to use optimus-manager to somehow force intel drivers(?) but to no avail (frankly i'm not the smartest person when it comes to drivers and gpu's.)
Also a fellow polish dude made a tutorial on youtube on how to switch to the nvidia-340 drivers on various distros, since i went "well, it's the oldest one, maybe by chance mine is compatible, even tho nothing says it is, might as well try" (spoiler, it didn't work). They mentioned in the video that to record the tutorial they already had to switch to the proprietary drivers because nouveau wasn't letting him use his second monitor, so mayhaps this also happens to slightly-newer gpu's? I've no idea. but i'm noting it here just in case.
Frankly i'm only a couple years into this space and it's my first time dealing with nvidia drivers. This looks to be an issue caused by a kernel update. I'd love to find forum posts of people with similar issues, whose solution was to just use an older version of their distro - but alas it's all lost through my frantic research.
Is there anything else i should do and note to help reproduce this? I've never opened an issue for something this low level. Sorry if this ends up a waste of time!