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I've spent hours to get my new Dell xps 9440 with Nvidia RTX 4050 GPU running. I freshly installed Ubuntu 23.10 with my bootable USB-Stick. After installing and restarting my device is stuck with a blackscreen and a blinking cursor while booting. I cant find any error messages in the journalctl. My devices uses 2 GPU's:

lspci | grep -E "VGA|3D"

0000:00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 7d55 (rev 08)
0000:01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 28a1 (rev a1)

nvidia-smi recognizes my GPU with driver-version: 535.161.07 and Cuda-Version: 12.2

When i switch to the intel grapic with sudo prime-select intel and then reboot. I can boot to the login-screen and use the system. When i switch to nvidia, i am stuck on the booting again with a blackscreen and a cursor. This time the cursors is not even blinking and i have to go to the grub recovery mode to switch the GPU again.

I have spent hours to browse the internet for fixes like:

reinstall the drivers with ubuntu-driver autoinstall, donwloaded a .run file from nvidia and tried to install it this way, used apt, checked for blacklist entries, edited the /etc/default/grub file and set parameters that were recomended. But whatever i tried, i always got stuck while booting when using on demand-mode or the nvidia gpu.

Can someone please help me to get the Device running with Ubuntu?

mikewhatever
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Voldomir
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1 Answers1

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tl;dr: Install Mainline Kernel >= 6.8 and Nvidia drivers should work as expected.

i currently setup the exact same machine. And actually most stuff is working quite well with just using a current kernel (graphics, wifi, bluetooth, even fingerprint reader and ambient light sensor). However, be prepared that webcam, internal audio are not going to work easily (currently checking to get at least the webcam up and running). Not sure about standby. It's not working for me, but i'm currently running ubuntu from an external SSD via USB and this might be the cause of the issue, so standby might work.

So for your initial problem. While doing the installation just be sure NOT to select the proprietary drivers. If you install the nvidia drivers with the kernel 6.5 ubnutu 23.10 is shipping with you won't get a working GUI. If you don't want to install again, you can go into recovery as others suggested and purge all nvidia stuff. Check for example How can I uninstall a nvidia driver completely ?

sudo apt-get remove --purge '^nvidia-.*'

After running that command you should be able to boot normally. However, it will barely work. Especially wifi, bluetooth etc are not working. So connect your PC with cable (usb tethering on phone or via ethernet) to the internet and install a => 6.8 mainline kernel. this is possible via cli, but the mainline GUI tool is more comfortable. https://github.com/bkw777/mainline?tab=readme-ov-file#install

After installing a current kernel with proper meteor lake support, most stuff should work. as said, some things are not working, so... full support for new hardware sometimes takes some time :-D

hope this helps!

I'm going to add a question here for webcam, maybe the answers there are interesting for you also.

Christoph Stickel
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