I’ve been wanting to upgrade my old Nvidia GTX 580 to an newer GeForce RTX2080.

Been a bit of a battle... when the new card came, I found that it did not really “fit” my case because the drive bay was in the way of the PCIe power plugs on the new card. Therefore, I go a whole new case as well and transferred the old motherboard and everything into the new case.

At this point, even though I didn’t change anything on the system, the older card /motherboard decided to forget each other. I remember years back that it was an issue getting that card to work (and override the motherboard video out),

So... I put my new card in. This card works well on boot up, but once past the grub options... Ubuntu Linux, including the log in screen, is just blank.

I have a USB boot disk which I can boot into Ubuntu from (e.g. as a live distro running from the USB drive). I was hoping that, being an install disk, it would give an option to update/reinstall the current Ubuntu while leaving my home dirs etc intact... but it is only offering to install alongside as a new partition or to completely wipe the previous install.

How can I uninstall / update the current Ubuntu graphics driver (not working because it is the old card) to get it up and running again with the new card? I don’t mind if it reverts to native Ubuntu graphics drivers like on the live USB stick for now... I just want to be able to log in to graphics mode again.

Very likely if you append nomodeset to the end of the linux line using the E key at the Grub menu you'll be able to boot to a command prompt and use apt to purge the old NVidia driver, and if you think it necessary, install the right one to match the new GPU. I would try both the FOSS drivers (modesetting, newer technology default; and nouveau, reverse-engineered option) before proceeding with the proprietary.

Awesome ��

Okay... grub menus are a lot more complex than I remember them.... I’m now in under very very low resolution. Running Synaptic, there are a lot of packages which come up when I search for nvidia ... loads of libnvidia etc. Is there something in particular I should be purging? Should this be better done as a command-line?

Or, better yet... is there a command that I could run to make nvidia reconfigure to the new card?
Will I also need to run grub set up again?

Nomodeset is a troubleshooting parameter. It is normal for its use to result in a very slow and low resolution display.

Before you get into NVidia driver installation you should probably investigate whether the RTX2080 has been around long enough to have support from the FOSS drivers.

I can't offer much about adding any kind of proprietary driver. I understand it is normal for NVidia driver installation to rebuild initrds, but I doubt grub needs to be affected.

Ubuntu is supposed to have a utility that makes installing drivers easy. I've never had occasion to look for it, but now that you have your low resolution desktop available you should be able to locate it.

In synaptic, click on installed in the left, look at the version # for nvidia-driver. By simply uninstalling that package, will uninstall everything else. In my Debian testing, the driver version is 430.64-4 which would be the appropriate for the RTX2080. If you have an older nvidia driver installed, the package to uninstall may be named nvidia-legacy-xxxx-driver. Either way, it's the driver that needs to be removed and all dependencies will go with it. EDIT: It may be nvidia-390 or nvidia-410 etc, uninstall the package with that name format.

As mentioned in the other post, once you install the new card, there is an application in Ubuntu to install proprietary drivers, which should install the Ubuntu recommended driver and configure everything automagically, typically found at Software & updates/additional drivers. This can also be done from command line with command ----> sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

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