Cannot activate nvidia driver 390.48

[GreyGeek]

Well, if you don't mind duplicating your efforts in another couple months, or you could continue to use it without updates or patches (but I wouldn't), then it doesn't matter. I don't know how well it will work. There are several posts on this forum about it. Do a search on 17.10 and give them a look.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/75nclp/ubuntu_1710_stable/

http://ppa.launchpad.net/graphics-drivers/ppa/ubuntu
if you need cuda
http://developer.download.nvidia.com...ntu1704/x86_64

PS: The bottom line is that a distro's stability is more dependent on the user than the distro (most of the time).

[jlittle]

Wrong move. First. DO NOT UPGRADE! That is the source of your problems. The docs say you can, but it rarely turns out OK.

Opinions vary on that. Other than the very bad upgrades from 14.04, often it has turned out OK for me and others.

... Usually takes about 15-20 minutes to do a basic install, then about 2-4 hours to install favorite programs and import important data.

It takes me days of full-attention effort, and I always forget stuff, and have to solve problems again. sudo do-release-upgrade runs mostly unattended.

17.10 EOL is this summer, in a couple months.

In the interest of accuracy, non-LTS releases live 9 months, so till later July, three months.

Reports are that.. 18.04 LTS is rock solid.

I can add to those reports. Solid, and something je ne sais quoi about it. (A new install was forced on me by 17.10 failing.) I installed 16.04 early, too, (hardware failure that time) and it was brilliant.

[Mister Pi]

if you need cuda
http://developer.download.nvidia.com...ntu1704/x86_64

I'd like to add to this. nVIDIA says CUDA isn't ready for 18.04; they only officially support 17.10 and 16.04, I think. The reason is that 18.04 changed package management, and their install scripts haven't caught up. I saw claims that CUDA would work on 18.04, so I tried it. I ran into lots of problems because I used nVIDIA's installation tools in their entirety. This screwed up the installation of the nVIDIA driver, which caused CUDA to fail on all graphics applications.

What I found is you can install CUDA on 18.04 (I did Kubuntu, but I assume Ubuntu works too because aren't packages managed the same way?), but you need to tweak the process.

The nVIDIA driver is already in the 18.04 repo, so download it from there. Currently, that would be

sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

Test with something like glmark2 to make sure you got higher perf (which would indicate the GPU and driver are actually being used -- may want to run glmark2 BEFORE you install the driver so you can compare against running the nouveau driver).

Then go to the link GreyGeek provided, and download your deb file. But don't do

sudo apt-get install cuda

as the instructions say. That will reinstall another version of the driver in a different place, and you'll get conflicts. Instead, do

sudo apt-get install cuda-toolkit

or cuda-toolkit-9-2 (or whatever your version number is) if it doesn't work without a version number. That will install everything but the driver (which you already installed)... and it should work.

[GreyGeek]

When I first installed Bionic about a month and a half ago I installed my GT 650M GPU using
sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall


which is the recommended way. Everything that NVIDIA needed was in the repository.
After the reboot everything just worked and continues to do so.

That is the first option in the following link, but the article also shows other methods as well.

https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-insta...c-beaver-linux