Needing help installing NVIDIA legacy 340.xx driver for gt 730 on ubuntu 20.04

Question

I still need further help for installing the NVIDIA driver properly for my geforce gt 730 gpu on my Ubuntu 20.04 machine, since all methods I tried have failed, I had no luck. It continues to give me this error even reverting to the ga kernel as @DanielT said:

Answer 1

With the combination of Nvidia drivers and kernels available from the Ubuntu 22.04 repos, I do not think you can do it.

I have a GT 730 as well and I have not been able to get it to run the Nvidia driver other than 340 on any Ubuntu newer than 20.04 with the GA kernel (currently 5.4.0-172-generic)

If I go HWE in 20.04, I can not get it to work, nor can I get it to work in 22.04.

+------------------------------------------------------+                       
| NVIDIA-SMI 340.108    Driver Version: 340.108        |                       
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GT 730      Off  | 0000:01:00.0     N/A |                  N/A |
| 33%   27C   P12    N/A /  N/A |     43MiB /  2039MiB |     N/A      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

OS: Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS x86_64 
Host: M11AD 
Kernel: 5.4.0-172-generic 
Uptime: 6 mins 
Packages: 2067 (dpkg) 
Shell: bash 5.0.17 
Terminal: /dev/pts/0 
CPU: Intel Pentium G3220 (2) @ 3.000GHz 
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT 730 
Memory: 246MiB / 7885MiB 

This is what flashed on the screen before login when I tried the 470 driver.

Research by @mchid unearthed that the particular version of the card I have, namely PCI Device ID 0x0f02, is known not to work with the 470 driver; other versions may.

I would love to be proven wrong.

Answer 2

Your installation error is because you did not remove the HWE kernel. nvidia-340 will not work with 5.15.0-67-generic. It will only work with 5.4.0-172-generic, as I tested in a 20.04 Docker container. You need to have exactly one kernel installed, and no other kernels for the nvidia-340 driver to work. One line of dpkg: error: version '-' has bad syntax: revision number is empty appears for each kernel version you have, and you have 3, which is 2 more than desired.

Furthermore 5.15.0-67-generic does not even exist in the repositories right now. The closest is 5.15.0-97-generic. Perhaps you forgot to run apt update for a long time, disabled automatic package list fetching, or installed a custom kernel. Anyway, since usual HWE removal steps didn't work for you, let's try something more forceful:

sudo -i
apt update
apt purge nvidia-340
dpkg --configure -a
apt upgrade
apt dist-upgrade
If the next step fails, don't reboot until you do apt install linux-generic
dpkg --get-selections | cut -f1 | grep '^linux-[^:]*[[:digit:]]' | xargs apt purge
apt install linux-headers-5.4.0-172 linux-headers-5.4.0-172-generic linux-image-5.4.0-172-generic linux-modules-5.4.0-172-generic linux-modules-extra-5.4.0-172-generic
apt install nvidia-340

Answer 3

Edit: if the following command returns a result for your GPU or VGA device, then this answer doesn't apply to you (use driver 390 instead of 470).

hwinfo --gfxcard | grep -i 0f02

---

According to the Nvidia website, the GeForce GT 730 should be using driver 470 (this does not apply to the GeForce GT 730 with PCI ID 0f02)

First, make sure your system is fully up to date or you will encounter issues:

sudo add-apt-repository restricted
sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade

Then reboot.

After a reboot, proceed with the installation:

sudo apt install --install-recommends nvidia-driver-470

When it's done, you will need to reboot to apply the changes.