Totally Remove Nvidia Drivers?

[GregM]

I bought a new Nvidia display card and it did not work out for me.
I did install what drivers I could find.

I have now removed the Nvidia card and wish to remove all the drivers, which still seem to be having effect.

Can someone tell me the terminal command for completely removing the Nvidia software/drivers?

Thanks
G

Kubuntu 16.04 and Plasma 5

[Snowhog]

From where, and how did you install, "what drivers I could find."?

[GregM]

I think it was on the Nvidia site.
Does it make a difference?

[Snowhog]

Meaining you downloaded one or more .deb packages, and then installed them from the command line, yes? Are those .deb packages still in your Downloads folder?

[GregM]

Nope
I've been trying to delete as much of this as possible

[vinnywright]

I think it was on the Nvidia site.
Does it make a difference?

yes it dose ,,,,,,,you nead to provide more info ,,,,,,like what kind of Nvidia card ,,,,whitch ver. of their driver (we have our own) ,,,what is the default(with out the Nvidia card) graphics device.

VINNY

[GregM]

Think I'll try to figure out how to go back to 14.04

[GreyGeek]

Think I'll try to figure out how to go back to 14.04

IMO, that would be a bad choice. 16.04 is better, and systemd is in control.

I added the following repository to my /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/graphics-drivers/ppa/ubuntu/ xenial maindeb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/graphics-drivers/ppa/ubuntu/ xenial main

My Acer V3-771G has an NVidia GT 650M GPU and I use the nvidia 371 378 driver and its dependencies. I pinned all the packages so they could not be updated. (If it's not broke, don't fix it!)



You can see the file names that are installed. My NVidia card, although it is a secondary card which CANNOT be made primary in the BIOS, behaves as if it is the primary and runs the Plasma desktop from the login and every app I run. Minecraft 1.12 vanilla gives me FPS ranging from 130 to 500.

Purge your current installed nvidia, cuda and other GPU related packages, remove their entries in /etc/apt/sources.list. Add the ubuntu gpu repository and begin by usuing nvidia-378 and its dependencies. Reboot. If your nvidia isn't working try a more recent version, one step at a time, until it does.

OR, reinstall 16.04 to get a clean base installation, then add the repository shown above, then (sudo apt-get update) and install the 378 package. Once you find the package that works pin it and its dependencies.

[GregM]

I pulled the Nvidia card a long time ago (just after I got it) A GEFORCE GT 610
But the effects of installing those drivers seems to linger.

[GreyGeek]

What does the output of
$ systemctl status nvidia-persistenced.service
give you?

Mine gives:

[COLOR=#54FF54][B]●[/B][/COLOR][COLOR=#000000] nvidia-persistenced.service - NVIDIA Persistence Daemon[/COLOR]
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/nvidia-persistenced.service; static; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: [COLOR=#54FF54][B]active (running)[/B][/COLOR][COLOR=#000000] since Mon 2017-06-12 09:32:39 CDT; 5h 16min ago[/COLOR]
 Main PID: 1415 (nvidia-persiste)
   CGroup: /system.slice/nvidia-persistenced.service
           └─1415 /usr/bin/nvidia-persistenced --user nvidia-persistenced --no-persistence-mode --verbose

Jun 12 09:32:39 jerry-Aspire-V3-771 systemd[1]: Starting NVIDIA Persistence Daemon...
Jun 12 09:32:39 jerry-Aspire-V3-771 nvidia-persistenced[1415]: Verbose syslog connection opened
Jun 12 09:32:39 jerry-Aspire-V3-771 nvidia-persistenced[1415]: Now running with user ID 118 and group ID 127
Jun 12 09:32:39 jerry-Aspire-V3-771 systemd[1]: Started NVIDIA Persistence Daemon.
Jun 12 09:32:39 jerry-Aspire-V3-771 nvidia-persistenced[1415]: [COLOR=#000000][B]Started (1415)[/B][/COLOR]
Jun 12 09:32:39 jerry-Aspire-V3-771 nvidia-persistenced[1415]: device 0000:01:00.0 - registered
Jun 12 09:32:39 jerry-Aspire-V3-771 nvidia-persistenced[1415]: Local RPC service initialized

You should get nothing if everything is removed.

[vinnywright]

I pulled the Nvidia card a long time ago (just after I got it) A GEFORCE GT 610
But the effects of installing those drivers seems to linger.

<sigh> ---------- ok then ,,,,,,what dose

dpkg -l | grep nvidia

show .

AND ,,,, if (you never did say for sure) you installed from the Nvidia web site ,,,,did you run the uninstall routine ?? or just start deleting things ?

VINNY

[GregM]

greg@greg-System-Product-Name:~$ systemctl status nvidia-persistenced.service
● nvidia-persistenced.service
Loaded: not-found (Reason: No such file or directory)
Active: inactive (dead)
greg@greg-System-Product-Name:~$

[GreyGeek]

greg@greg-System-Product-Name:~$ systemctl status nvidia-persistenced.service
● nvidia-persistenced.service
Loaded: not-found (Reason: No such file or directory)
Active: inactive (dead)
greg@greg-System-Product-Name:~$

Did you delete manually, instead of using APT or a package manager? Normally, when you uninstall, remove or purge a package it will disable the systemd service.

Issue in a Konsole:
sudo systemctl disable nvidia-persistenced.service
sudo systemctl masked nvidia-persistenced.service

Then, clean your repository archive:
sudo apt autoclean

The archive will be rebuilt the next time you use apt or apt-get.

I'd recommend using Discover, Muon or Synaptic to add or remove packages from the repositories until such time as you feel proficient in doing such tasks manually as root. Merely deleting directories a/o executable binaries is a method guaranteed to corrupt your system and your local archive, even if you installed them manually yourself. Under the "Origin" catagory in those package managers will be the list of packages you installed using Qapt in Dolphin, or dpkg from a CLI. You can delete them using the package manager.

Considering all the time you've used so far it would have been easier and much quicker to just re-install using a LiveUSB.

[GregM]

I did everything I could find using a Bing search.
As I recall the last thing was a terminal "purge nvidia" command I found on a website

[GreyGeek]

I did everything I could find using a Bing search.
As I recall the last thing was a terminal "purge nvidia" command I found on a website

The success of any particular command depends on the state of your system at the time you execute it. IF you've used several other commands with mixed or no success subsequent commands probably won't work either. Purging nvidia may not work if the nvidia files are in a broken condition because of previous commands used. If, for example, you delete one or more nvidia files manually and then later try "purge nvidia" there is no guarantee of success. This is how many dependencies get left behind, libraries which "think" that nvidia is still installed and they continue to attempt to do what they were designed to do when called by sddm, or whatever.

General rule of thumb: stick with repositories. Use a package manager.