NVIDIA 390 black screen

1

Hi there, I am very new to Linux and I am still learning so any help is much appreciated.
I have recently installed the latest NVIDIA drivers on Ubuntu Budgie and I thought all was well until I rebooted into a black screen. I am able to access the terminal from that screen by ctlr alt F1 and after purging NVIDIA I was able to log in again. It seems that the driver is causing my laptop to black screen, is there any fix around this at all. I did a bit of a search and couldn’t find anything recent.
My laptop is using a GTX 675m, to add to this I was previously using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and had no issues with NVIDIA drivers but I don’t believe it was the 390 version.

Thank you everyone I appreciate the time and help.

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2

Hi,

just a quick guess: check if your kernel version works with NVIDIA v390. Going back to v389 might be a good idea.

I had the same issue with (X)ubuntu at kernels prior to 4.13.0 as the DKMS module fails to install. Currently I use kernel 4.13.0-36-generic and NVIDIA 390.25 which works fine.

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3

You could also try the previous version (387.34). You can install the nvidia graphics PPA and install that specific version to see if it works for you:

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

Instructions on how to add the PPA and install the drivers are on that page.

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4

Unfortunately I had no luck with either solution, I ended up installing the 17.10.1 LTS build of Budgie rather than 18.04 and had no problems with the drivers on this release. Thank you again for all of your help!

5

I could reproduce the issue a bit more detailed. Installing NVIDIA v390 leads to different results:

  • a black screen, but only with slick-greeter (out of the box behaviour)
  • a black screen with slick-greeter and unity-greeter installed, forcing lightdm to use slick-greeter
  • using unity-greeter at least shows a login screen (but doesn’t scale on HiDPI)
6

to be honest @vinzv I don’t know how Ubuntu deals with proprietary driver issues - not sure if there is a linux part of nvidia website to report issues.

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7

Just was reading this https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4574

it mentions black-screens with the nvidia drivers - it appears the nvidia X driver is buggy for some cards and does not (always) activate the modesetting part of X

Their workaround was to add to lightdm.conf display-setup-script=xrandr --output eDP-1-1 --mode 1920x1080 where eDP-1-1 corresponded to the xrandr display. Think it is well worth having a read of that bug report

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8

Heck, that’d be cool if that works. Thanks!
But as UB doesn’t have /etc/lightdm/lighdm.conf - where should I place the display-setup-script setting?

9

This happened to me installing Nvidia 390 with 18.04 beta 2. Purging via ctrl-alt-F1 terminal got me back to normal. Any progress on this front yet? Thanks!

10

has anyone actually reported this to canonical (launchpad) or nvidia themselves ? link to the bug report?

11

this looks like a candidate bug report with a long discussion

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-390/+bug/1752053

It has just been marked as fix released though. People are still reporting black screens post that release.

… but as the triager says - if you still have an issue then report it as a new bug report - adding to that bug report above will just be ignored.

12

Got it. Will report as a new bug…

13

Thanks - please drop a link to your new report here. Cheers.

Also found another nvidia 390 lightdm bug report that people can monitor: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-390/+bug/1756226

14

ok - more advice here to try - people have found success using comment #20 here

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-390/+bug/1756226

Seems to be a consistent failure all round of the 390 series of proprietary drivers from nvidia.

15

Ok - what I found that works for me (recording this in bug report https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-390/+bug/1764005

I am using a GTX960M graphics chipset

I switched to a TTY (CTRL+ALT+F4) and logged in a TTY

Checked and if necessary installed nvidia-prime i.e.

sudo apt install nvidia-prime

Then I ran

sudo prime-select intel

Rebooted and all was well

If that doesnt work I also found I can use the opensource nouveau drivers successfully

i.e. in a TTY

sudo apt-get remove nvidia-*

NOTE - the - in the above command

reboot and all is well

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16

I went with the

sudo prime-select intel

method and have a working system again.
What I find strange is that everything (both Intel and Nvidia graphics) work fine under 17.10

I’m on a HP ZBook 15

niels@zbook:~$ lspci | grep -i vga
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 06)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK208GLM [Quadro K610M] (rev a1)

17

@nroetert the very latest from today is that the canonical dev has identified the issue and says it is straightforward to fix. So we are all just waiting for the update to be pushed hopefully very soon.

18

I saw a lot of Nvidia related updates come in yesterday, but those didn’t help.
Guess you are refering to a near future update, hanging on.

19

My bug report above is detailing the current investigation.

20

That was the same situation for me as well.