Latest nvidia drivers horribly broken.

[pnunn]

Hi folks,

in the process of trying to work out why my wifi turned off last night (showing up as software disabled) I went to the new driver manager and found that there were a bunch of new nvidia drivers so thought, why not (am I an idiot!!).

I tried to update from the working 331 to 340 and everything turned to *C(GF.

Upon reboot, nouveau was in control. I blacklisted it and updated the kernel and then got a vga screen.

After a bunch of mucking around, back to the 331 driver and graphics are working again. What the How can selecting the "recommended" driver break things so badly?

Peter.

[dibl]

It's not good, for sure. FYI, generally you are on dangerous ground whenever you get ahead of the official current Nvidia recommendation for your OS and architecture, from here. For my GTX-480, they show 331.79 is current. Being an adventurous type who runs Debian Sid, I have a newer version and it is working very well:

root@imerabox:/# apt-cache policy nvidia-glx
nvidia-glx:
  Installed: 337.25-0.siduction.3
  Candidate: 337.25-0.siduction.3
  Version table:
 *** 337.25-0.siduction.3 0
        500 http://packages.siduction.org/experimental/ unstable/non-free amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     337.19-1 0
          1 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ experimental/non-free amd64 Packages
     331.79-1 0
        500 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable/non-free amd64 Packages
     331.67-1.siduction.1 0
        500 http://packages.siduction.org/fixes/ unstable/non-free amd64 Packages

But, as you can see, ver. 340 is not even in Debian experimental yet, so I have no clue why *buntu would recommend such an untested driver.

[whatthefunk]

Do you have any PPA enabled? I just checked my system and 340 is not an option.

[SteveRiley]

Let's take a look:

steve@t520:~$ [B]apt-cache search --names-only nvidia-[0-9]{3}$[/B]
nvidia-173 - NVIDIA legacy binary driver - version 173.14.39
nvidia-310 - Transitional package for nvidia-310
nvidia-319 - Transitional package for nvidia-319
nvidia-304 - NVIDIA legacy binary driver - version 304.121
nvidia-331 - NVIDIA binary driver - version 331.79
nvidia-334 - NVIDIA binary driver - version 334.21
nvidia-337 - NVIDIA binary driver - version 337.25
nvidia-340 - NVIDIA binary driver - version 340.17

steve@t520:~$ [B]apt-cache policy nvidia-[0-9]{3}$[/B]
nvidia-304:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 304.121-0ubuntu1~xedgers14.04.2
  Version table:
     304.121-0ubuntu1~xedgers14.04.2 0
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/xorg-edgers/ppa/ubuntu/ trusty/main amd64 Packages
     304.117-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://mirror.pnl.gov/ubuntu/ trusty/restricted amd64 Packages
nvidia-310:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 319.60-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
     319.60-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://mirror.pnl.gov/ubuntu/ trusty/restricted amd64 Packages
nvidia-313:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: (none)
  Version table:
nvidia-319:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 331.38-0ubuntu7
  Version table:
     331.38-0ubuntu7 0
        500 http://mirror.pnl.gov/ubuntu/ trusty/restricted amd64 Packages
nvidia-325:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: (none)
  Version table:
nvidia-331:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 331.79-0ubuntu1~xedgers14.04.1
  Version table:
     331.79-0ubuntu1~xedgers14.04.1 0
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/xorg-edgers/ppa/ubuntu/ trusty/main amd64 Packages
     331.38-0ubuntu7 0
        500 http://mirror.pnl.gov/ubuntu/ trusty/restricted amd64 Packages
nvidia-334:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 334.21-0ubuntu1~xedgers14.04.1
  Version table:
     334.21-0ubuntu1~xedgers14.04.1 0
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/xorg-edgers/ppa/ubuntu/ trusty/main amd64 Packages
nvidia-337:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 337.25-0ubuntu1~xedgers14.04.2
  Version table:
     337.25-0ubuntu1~xedgers14.04.2 0
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/xorg-edgers/ppa/ubuntu/ trusty/main amd64 Packages
nvidia-340:
  Installed: 340.17-0ubuntu1~xedgers14.04.1
  Candidate: 340.17-0ubuntu1~xedgers14.04.1
  Version table:
 *** 340.17-0ubuntu1~xedgers14.04.1 0
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/xorg-edgers/ppa/ubuntu/ trusty/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
nvidia-173:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 173.14.39-0ubuntu3
  Version table:
     173.14.39-0ubuntu3 0
        500 http://mirror.pnl.gov/ubuntu/ trusty/restricted amd64 Packages

Trusty inlcludes 173.14, 304.117, 319.60, and 331.38. Xorg-Edgers includes 304.121, 331.79, 334.21, 337.25, and 340.17.

340.17 is working fine here, just did a routine upgrade from 337.25. As usual, I performed the upgrade from the command prompt, not from any GUI package manager.

[SteveRiley]

But, as you can see, ver. 340 is not even in Debian experimental yet, so I have no clue why *buntu would recommend such an untested driver.

*buntu means *uinea pig or *ab rat, right?

[dequire]

*buntu means *uinea pig or *ab rat, right?

...Lest we forget

[dtr]

I am currently using Nvidia 340.17 (which is still beta, so some breakage is possible) here on my laptop with Quadro FX 1600M, and I have no problems at all. That being said, I once had a problem with one update from X-org Edgers PPA back when I was on 13.10, which I ended up fix by disabling the PPA and uninstalling all things Nvidia and re-installed to a regular release of the driver.

[pnunn]

Just tried 340.25 with the same degree of success... sigh. Reported to nvidia with the bug report.