Can't recover Nvidia driver after GPU upgrade

uncle_rufus · 11 Aug 2015 at 11:18

Hey all,

Scratching my head over this one... the Mint 14 partition of my system seems to have screwed up since I replaced my GPU (670 - 970) and I can't seem to get it back into a working state...

Here's the symptoms:
- Only 1 out of 3 of my monitors displays anything

- If I go to Nvidia settings to fix this, I get a popup telling me something isn't configured and to run an nvidia command. Doing this as root changes nothing...

- So I downloaded the drivers for my new GPU manually, shutdown X as instructed, and ran the driver .run script - but I get a message saying something like "the pre-install script failed, continue anyway?"

- I also tried updating nvidia-current using apt but it also doesn't change anything

- Under the "additional drivers" tab of "software sources" where I think it used to allow me to select graphics driver sources etc. it's just blank and greyed-out

Am I being thick? What am I supposed to do to get this working? I could re-install if needs be though I was hoping to not have to do that

stopper · 11 Aug 2015 at 15:16

Try adding the xorg ppa

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa -y
sudo apt-get update

then try to reinstall with the additional drivers tab again

uncle_rufus · 11 Aug 2015 at 15:19

I think I did do that last night, but I'll try it again when I get home, thanks... (if I recall it seemed to think that "nvidia-current" was already at the latest version or something along those lines)

stopper · 12 Aug 2015 at 20:17

The Ubuntu team have opened up their very own official Nvidia ppa, you could always give that a try.

https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

uncle_rufus · 13 Aug 2015 at 07:08

Cheers, I'll have a go but starting to think I might just re-install...

Tempted to give Manjaro a try as I keep hearing good things about it

OhEsEcks · 16 Aug 2015 at 07:39

Search your system for installed nvidia or nouveau packages.

Code:

dpkg --list | grep -i --color nvidia

Code:

dpkg --list | grep -i --color nouveau

If they return any results, delete what's installed.

Code:

apt-get --purge remove *whatever returned results you got*

That Tangina Barrons everything related to nvidia / nouveau display drivers and **** out of the system.

For installing the proprietary driver you need to download the kernel headers and build-essentials tools to build / install the driver against the kernel.

Code:

apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)

Now run the NVIDIA binary.

Code:

sh NVIDIA-whatever-the-rest-of-the-name-is.run

From what I remember of building the driver manually like this, the build script can sometimes throw out an error about gcc not matching. It doesn't matter. It's just telling you that a different version of gcc was used to the one you have installed. Usually the one you have installed is newer.

Also, during any prompting through the build script, make sure you generate a new xorg conf file. Then just reboot. If resolution is messed up on reboot, you may need to force DPI settings to 96x96 manually in the xorg conf file. From what I remember it's under the "Monitor" section in the conf file. You just add;

Code:

OPTION    "DPI"    "96x96"

to the Monitor section. Or you can do it graphically through nvidia-settings I think.

It's been a while since I've used that method, on Debian or FreeBSD... so YMMV.

Edward78 · 16 Aug 2015 at 17:11

uncle_rufus said:
Cheers, I'll have a go but starting to think I might just re-install...

Tempted to give Manjaro a try as I keep hearing good things about it

I just watched a video on youtube sounds interesting, the clock issue & Chrome/keyring issues sound annoying, but will get fixed I am sure...This is .rpm based I bet, so hopefully YaST compatible, since I stopped using opensuse, I have missed YaST...

uncle_rufus · 16 Aug 2015 at 21:20

OhEsEcks said:
** snip **

Useful stuff, thanks... I have reinstalled anyway now but always good to get some tips, might be useful in the future

Edward78 said:
I just watched a video on youtube sounds interesting, the clock issue & Chrome/keyring issues sound annoying, but will get fixed I am sure...This is .rpm based I bet, so hopefully YaST compatible, since I stopped using opensuse, I have missed YaST...

Seems to be running well for me so far, didn't hit any major issues with the install; took a couple of tries to get the UEFI boot from USB to not hang... Also I clobbered the boot manager slightly, locking me out of Windows, but it was a simple case of re-installing REFind to the boot partition from within Manjaro. Haven't spent a long time with it yet but seems snappy and light on resources (it's just Xfce; though I quite like it, I expected I might think it was a bit too plain but it's alright)

Going to get to work setting things up and testing etc. now