Installing the new kernel 4.0 has not been easy on my computer with an nvidia 9600 graphical card. I never succeeded once with Linux Mint 17.1 and got stuck in errors that were thrown at me.

Now you must know that I have been using other distro’s on the same hardware like Antergos and Archlinux and all with kernel 4.0. Then it struck me. It can be done.

What am I doing wrong when I boot the Linux Mint 17.1?

 

So I reinstalled Linux Mint 17.1 following my own guide and scripts at github.

https://github.com/erikdubois/Ultimate-Linux-Mint-17.1

My intention was actually improving the script from github but then it struck me how to get kernel 4.0 to work on my machine.

I followed all the steps till number 3.

Best done in a testing environment. If that is not possible, be sure that you have backups. The cloud aka dropbox and copy are all valid linux solutions.

Then I downloaded the latest 4.0 kernel of that time : 4.0.4.

Installed it like in the other article.

When I rebooted I got an xserver error.

I read and skipped the message to arrive at the terminal.

Login and do the following.

Kernel 4.0 is equiped to work with a bunch of nvidia graphical cards out of the box!

This is a screenshot of one of my installations where we can see what hardware is supported by the 4.0 kernel by the nouveau driver.

kernel4-nvidia

 

So I decided to delete the drivers that Linux Mint installed in the previous steps and took a leap of faith.

 

Screenshot from 2015-05-16 10:46:52

Then I rebooted the system and kernel 4.0 did its magic.

I had a working system!!

Then I skipped step 5 of the article : Nvidia updates all together.

I skipped step 6 as well and went straight to the installation of the latest build of cinnamon (step 7) as described in the article.

And now I am happy I can share this knowledge with others. Enjoy.

Screenshot from 2015-05-22 20_23_53

Check out the image.

Latest cinnamon and latest kernel.