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I'm running a laptop with Nvidia Optimus on Xubuntu 18.04, and I can't seem to get the nvidia drivers to work at all.

I've run both Kubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu Budgie 18.04, and was able to login using nvidia-390 drivers (although the login screen was black until I tried logging in, which allowed me to log in using nvidia drivers, the login screens just never loaded?), but on Xubuntu 18.04, it feels like I've tried everything to get nvidia drivers to work period. I've tried upwards of 6 different nvidia drivers (340, 380, 384, 390, there's likely some others I'm forgetting), tried running nvidia-xconfig, tried deleting /etc/X11/xorg.conf, even trying editing grub boot options.

The closest I have seemingly gotten is changing no grub boot options, installing any nvidia driver, and running nvidia-xconfig. This still doesn't allow me to boot into the login screen, but it will show the splash login screen as always, but the bootup will freeze with a non-blinking cursor in the upper left of the screen.

I can get into a TTY with CTRL+ALT+F1, and make changes there, I just am never able to actually get into a login screen. Grub is completely viewable, and without doing nvidia-xconfig, I can still get into a TTY, but the screen is completely blank until I enter a TTY, as opposed to with nvidia-xconfig, where I can get into a TTY, but it freezes on that non-blinking cursor.

I've been banging my head against a wall for days trying to figure this out, so any help is appreciated, and I can get more information as needed.

Zanna
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Ness
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4 Answers4

1

I used Xubuntu 16.04 and it worked good, just one time issues with NVIDIA drivers, but since then i didn't have issues. Well with coming of Xubuntu 18.04 i had no cuda support in Blender. I though it was a problem with Quadro GPUs... then i removed Quadro, got a new Gigabyte GTX 750 ti 4GB Ram, did a fresh reinstall and configured the drivers, but on rendering in Blender was running in Xeon CPU. Tried to install drivers from NVIDIA and setup failed in TTY1. I formatted again the machine, downloaded again NVIDIA drivers and still it failed. During these installations and tests, it i had several bugs.

Probably i will install old Xubuntu 16.04 again. I think there is something wrong on new LTS versions of Ubuntu family and between loosing all this time trying to make it work... instead of install and get back to the work there is a huge difference. Of course this is not the kind of way i like to spend my time or getting other GPU cards hopping this or that might work.

I hope someone fix this soon.

Ardit Dashaj
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0

I'm having this issue as well. Best solution I have found is:

sudo apt remove libnvidia-ifr1-390 libnvidia-ifr1-390:i386 nvidia-driver-390

This just allows non nvidia updates to continue but does not solve the issue itself.

davidbaumann
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Drop MC
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0

I had the same problem with my Xubuntu 18.04 version that runs on Nvidia GPU.

I tried installing the latest Nvidia-390 and nvidia-prime drivers and updated my driver installs as shown in Is nomodeset still required? and Trying to install Ubuntu results in freezing splash screen - nomodeset did not work, and I added nouveau to the block list, but none of these worked.

So what I did is that I added the parameternouveau.modeset=0 to grub.cfg file in \boot\grub\ directory. I added the line after every "linux..." line, for instance:

menuentry 'FAILSAFE' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
    recordfail
    set gfxpayload=$linux_gfx_mode
    insmod part_msdos
    insmod ext2
    set root='(hd0,msdos8)'
    search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 36286167-4eba-4a1e-a202-155c6baafa01
    linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-12-generic root=UUID=36286167-4eba-4a1e-a202-155c6baafa01 ro vt.handoff=7 quiet splash nouveau.modeset=0
    initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.37-12-generic
    }

So, I believe you have to add this parameter in all the script. I tried this solution and Nvidia GPU driver stopped crashing.

Another approach as described in Ubuntu 18.04 stopped working with NVIDIA drivers

Execute sudo nano /etc/default/grub and add the parameter nvidia-drm.modeset=1 between the double quotes to the line beginning GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. Save the change you've made and run sudo update-grub.

Restart the Ubuntu operating system, and now, everything should work properly - right as expected.

Zanna
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debugging XD
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0

Here is a live iso xubuntu-bionic with nvidia-390.48 and prime from MatheuGras-TimRichardson

It switched correctly on live testing with Acer VN7 laptop 4GB

https://sourceforge.net/projects/toysbox/files/bionic-nvidia/xubuntu-18.04-4.15.0-24-nvidia.iso

Screenshots + Logs are on the site

user3477652
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