I have reported that I had problems with starting to the Xfce-Surface of my Arch Linux.

In the international Arch Linux forum I have posed the issue with a big excerpt of my log files. Of course I have read so many articles in the Arch Linux wiki and other problems in the Arch Linux forum but for me I had not find something.

After my return from the city centre where my bike (with a problem) is now parking I have registered to the Arch Linux forum. In fact I had learned that there are stupid questions but I had to ask whether there is a solution.

On 01/01/2018 when there were still the Kernel 4.14.xxx the nvidia driver

nvidia-304xx-dkms 304.137-21


have still worked. I was happy.

Due to the problem of the Meltdown and Spectre issue I was keeping tabs on the new kernel version 4.15. On Wednesday evening I have updated to the new kernel 4.15.1-2 but after a reboot the operating system only could start to the command line. In the first moment I was shocked.

I have waited a few day because this kernel version was flagged by the Arch Linux team. Kernel 4.15.2-2 was a long time (not really but it has seemed a long time) in „testing“.

In „testing“ the application were still tested. When the team who is responsible for „testing“  are ready they go to the official „core“ area where everybody can download it (pacman -Syu) as root. I did it but I was shocked, again, because nothing has changed.

For then I knew it was only a problem on my pc and not a general kernel problem.

The Arch Linux team could not help me. I should remove the nvidia driver from the system. It is unsupported driver version of Nvidia because it is an old driver for

(the output of lspci | grep Ge)

 00:0d.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation C61 [GeForce 7025 / nForce 630a] (rev a2)

In the Arch Linux wiki there is entry:

„For GeForce 6/7 series cards [NV4x and NV6x], install the nvidia-304xx-dkmsAUR[broken link: archived in aur-mirror] package. Last supported Xorg version is 1.19“

And I think the end of life of these old driver is now there.  I have removed it with

pacman -Rn nvidia-304xx-dkms

and now I „only“ use the nouveau driver which is a open-source driver.

The disadvantage is that it jitters sometimes. Not very nice.

I have decided to use this pc for the living-room while I use the pc with Fedora 26 for my videos.

On the Arch Linux I did the first installation after pacaur via the AUR. I have installed my very favourite tool pdftk. With pdftk you can split and merge pdf files with this syntax

pdftk *.pdf output cat xx.pdf

Very easy, or?