NVIDIA X Server Settings not opening - Ububtu 18.04.1 LTS

Question

I just installed nvidia-driver-390 on my laptop which has a Quadro M1200 card along with an Intel VGA controller. The 390 is the recommended driver per Ubuntu and it installs correctly.

       description: 3D controller
       product: GM107GLM [Quadro M1200 Mobile]
       vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
       version: a2
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=nvidia latency=0
       resources: irq:136 memory:ec000000-ecffffff memory:c0000000-cfffffff memory:d0000000-d1ffffff ioport:e000(size=128) memory:ed000000-ed07ffff

The driver has configured xorg.conf and has installed X Server Settings. However, when I click X Server Setting, nothing happens. I've looked around and it seems that the reason is that Nvidia doesn't support Wayland. So I rebooted and when prompted to log in, clicked on the little gear icon and chose Ubuntu (rather than Ubuntu on Wayland) and the machine freezes. How can I access nvidia settings?

I've already done sudo prime-select nvidia and it returns: Info: the nvidia profile is already set.

Solution 1

So purging everything and installing the latest driver did the trick. Here are the steps to properly install the driver:

1. Blacklist the open source driver Nouveau as described here.

2. Drop down to runlevel 3 using sudo init 3

3. Run sudo apt-get purge nvidia*. This will clear out all the strangling files.

4. Navigate to the new driver's shell file and do bash NVIIDA_DRIVER_HERE.sh

5. Follow the prompts on the screen and wait for the installation to complete.

6. Reboot using sudo reboot.

7. When logging in after the reboot, make sure that you do so using an X session and not a Wayland session. Run nvidia-settings.

Solution 2

First, try the following command in a terminal to check if the NVIDIA driver was installed correctly:

nvidia-smi

See if the NVIDIA GPU(s) is listed along with it's attributes, such as the Driver Version and the Processes utilizing the GPU(s).

Then, try running the following command in the terminal:

nvidia-settings

An NVIDIA X Server Settings interface should pop up, allowing you to make the modifications and changes desired.

Comments

[FN68]

Thanks for your response. The nvidia-smi does return the name of the GPU along with driver version (390.77). It finds no "running processes" which I'm not sure is a good sign. nvidia-settings returns: ERROR: Unable to find display on any available system.

[engineerRed]

From this issue on github, the recommendation is to update the driver. Can you try installing NVIDIA driver R396 U2, found here? The Quadro M1200 is supported by this driver, released May 2018. See if this driver will provide the support needed.

[FN68]

Found one that was released Jan 3rd, 2019. I'll try it and report back. Thank you again.

[FN68]

The new driver worked. I still have the problem of Nvidia not working with Wayland. The good thing about Wayland is that it has fractional scaling of displays coded in whereas gnome apparently doesn't.