Problem Installing NVidia Driver
 

Hi,
I have an existing Ubuntu installation. I got an extra graphic card from NVidia (the 550Ti). I managed to get it to display the GUI in a low resolution mode, but as you can understand I wanted to install the driver to get the normal screen resolution and other features. The trouble was that when I tried to run NVIDIA-Linux-x86-331.79.run (with Sudo) I got a message that I already had a GUI running, so I had better turn it off.
So I went to some forums and found some advice about turning off the graphics by rebooting with grub and let it boot in text mode. But now the display of characters on my screen are just gibberish if I use my Nvidia card (not with the original motherboard graphics hardware). I tried an older (CRT) screen with the Nvidia and nothing was displayed at all when using a VGA adapter.
I did manage to display text if I removed my Nvidia card, but then the installation of the Nvidia driver said it could not find the card and seems to have aborted.
So to summarize:
I can get my installation in text mode to run if I remove the NVidia card, but I can only get a degraded Graphics mode with the NVidia card.


Does anyone have any suggestions? This looks like a catch 22 situation.

I can't help you with the garbled text in text mode, but if you manage to start text mode with the nvidia card: The program to recognize hardware and suggest driver packages is (in ubuntu):

Try "nano", maybe it is installed.

or

Next time when doing experiments with grub: You can press "e" in grub to edit an entry just for once, without making the change permament. Press "e" again on the line you want to edit, edit it and press enter, press "b" to boot the changed entry.

Welcome to Linux Questions!

Ubuntu has a "find alternate drivers" thingy in the Admin or preferences section of the menus. If you pick this it will go and check and show you what's available. You click on the "recommended" NVidea one, it loads, you have to log out and in again to reset the X-server and you should be in business. :D You also end up with an NVidea set up utility which lets you configure various bits of your graphic set-up, double screens, etc.

Just because it's Linux doesn't mean you have to do everything using the CLI.

Play Bonny!

:hattip:

Thankyou for your help.
I have not managed to boot in text mode with the NVidia card so far, it's gibberish.
However I suppose I could try to launch the GUI (Gnome) and shut it down to get into text mode.
I found some information here

Right now I am in the middle of a long overdue backup of my files, in case I screw up!

If you can start the gui while your nvidia card is plugged in, there is no need to drop down to text mode. In this case, do what Soadyheid said: Use the version of jockey with a graphical user interface. Search for "Additional drivers", the icon looks like an expansion card. Do what the program suggests.

I thought you had already hosed your system too much to get to a gui, even better if that's not the case.

Ok, my backup was juge and I managed to get back to a low res GUI.
jockey-text and jockey-GTK found nothing.

Found nothing while you had the nvidia card built in? This is odd.

Please post the output of

and

Well, I have found a compromise: in Synaptic I typed Nvidia, and there are a number of drivers that are proposed. I chose NVidia-331, because the name seemed close to the one I wanted to install as a run file.
Now at least a gui displays when I run Linux, but the screen resolution is substandard: 1024x768 and the display parameters tool does not seem to let me do any better.

If you type "nvidia" in the desktops search, does it find a program with an nvidia logo, named "nVidia Settings" or "nVidia control" or "nVidia ....something"? This should tell you if the nvidia driver is running at all.

Yes, it finds NVidia X Server Settings.
Thankyou.
Not the most user-friendly gui I have ever seen,
I shall have to spend more than an hour in its documentation I guess.

I had a quick look at the driver settings documentation and saw nothing about screen resolution.

Ok the nvidia driver seems to be running, but with a lesser resolution than card and monitor are capable of. You can find out which resolutions are supported with the program "xrandr":

Time to look at the xorg.conf file. It should be located in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Make a backup first:

The file contains sections like these:

Look at the "Modes" line. Add the resolution you want to have at the front, or add the whole SubSection "Display" if it is not there. Do not change other things like Identifiers, these are just examples here.

More references:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/Resolution

That's very helpful indeed.
Unfortunately there is no xorg.conf file, but there is a xorg.conf.failsafe file
I could copy that to xorg.conf and add the lines you suggested. The explicit resolutions are not listed at all.
it looks like this

This means the nvidia driver package installation did not do its job correctly, because to use the nvidia driver you need at least the entry

in "Device".

Can you check if the nvidia kernel module is available to your kernel? To do so:

Hi Cepheus
I used the following xorg.conf file (I pasted it below).
The result was unsuccessful. in fact I got a message saying that none of the resolutions could work and display reverted to 640x480

Hi Cepheus
I missed your latest message.
I tried
and got an error message
This is strange, because I thought I was using nvidia version 331

any attempt to reinstall nvidia_304_updates vis Synaptic ends up with an error.
I cant seem to get rid of nvidia_304, it always pops up with the modprobe call suggested, even if I have tried to uninstall it with synaptic.
I thought version 331 might be better.

Something has eaten my message... Anyway: "No such device" means it claims to not find the hardware. Can you

and post the result?

Hi Cepheus
Here is the result of lscpi

Ok there it is:

Searching for "NVIDIA Corporation Device 1380" suggests that this is actually a GTX 750 Ti, but I'm no expert on these numbers.

550 Ti should be supported by your driver version.
750 Ti is not, it is supported by 334.21 or higher.

Good point!
Yes, I have lost the box, I could open up my PC.
I do know that the card has the very latest Nvidia architecture and is
Cuda Capability 5.0
I did find a very recent driver a few weeks ago but as a run file.
would not that mean shutting down X?
I have not managed to do that.

I would generally advise against executing the script from nvidia, because if it fails, or becomes obsolete by future updates, it is complicated to remove the remnants and get a working system again. However, the latest ubuntu-packaged driver is something 331 which is not current enough: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+search?text=nvidia.

However, I have found this, so if you're brave or have backups:

http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/...-ubuntu-linux/

Thankyou for all your help.
Earlier I did try stopping the X server with the same command as in the article.
However, much to my surprise I dont get the impression I go into text mode as I see no command prompt and no output from any of the basic commands.
I see the echo of my entered commands however, and shutdown -H now seems to have worked!

Hi Cepheus
Well, I had a shot at version 334 and my system appears to be working much better now.
Here are some salient points:
I typed Control-Alt-F1 to get into full screen.
Then I killed the X server from within that: sudo service lightdm stop.
I was still in text mode, so my previous worry was removed.
Then I tried sudo ./NVidia-Linux-x86-334.31.run
The first time round it failed , I tried again, it told me my gcc was the wrong version (4.8.1) instead of 4.6.
So I changed the symbolic link on gcc: ls -s gcc-4.6 gcc
I then ran the script and I declined the running with DPKMS (probably a bad idea on my part)
But I ran into no further errors.
Now my screen has a nice high resolution, without any manual configuration from me.

Sounds good. To confirm the nvidia driver is running, you can install the package "mesa-utils" in software center (if not already installed), and type "glxinfo|head" in a console window. It should say something like "glx vendor string: NVidia Corporation".

that was not the normal way to install the nvidia drivers.

in ubuntu in settings you have additional drivers which will find the proprietary nvidia drivers for your system and they work best. install and use them

or

to install the nvidia binary drivers. typically you download the binary, right click it and make it executable and then do a alt-F1 to drop to a shell and login. issue a /etc/init.d/gdm stop or whatever wm you are running. (Cannot recall the right command but google it to stop the display manager) and navigate to the downloaded location of the file and type it out to run it.

from past experience with Ubuntu. also down load nvidia-xconfig. and run it, this will create the correct xorg.conf file.

also uninstall bumblebee if it installs. that prevents the system from booting the nvidia driver. (bumblebee might be fixed now)

my two cents

That's what I did!

To me this process seems to have become overly complicated.
To install the NVIDIA drivers on Ubuntu the best way is to use either jockey or the software centre. With a card of that age you should be fine using the newest driver available from the Ubuntu repository and using the driver from the repository should mean that when the kernel is updated you don't find yourself booting into a blank black screen.
Once the driver has been installed and you have rebooted (it is vital you either reboot or restart X11 to apply the driver and rebooting is much simpler) you should then run nvidia-settings using sudo, set the resolution and other settings you require then (in X Server Display Configuration) click "Save to X Configuration file).
There are other ways to do this I am sure but the above has always worked for me when other things have failed or caused issues and is based upon the Ubuntu and Debian NVIDIA driver installation guides.

It's a 750 Ti, only a few months old.

Ah, sorry, you had said it was a 550 Ti which is of an age which should be well supported by Ubuntu.

Yes, that was my initial mistake.
I could not find the box.
Then Cepheus corrected me when he asked me to launch an application that identifies the card.