[PLASMA 5] Driver manager is being difficult

[bradleypariah]

TLR - Two questions at the bottom of this post.

Full background: I have a gtx680 GPU, and I added the official GPU PPA to 18.04.

When I open Plasma's Driver Manager, it tells me I'm running the Nouveau driver, even though I'm positive that I'm not. I have installed the 418 driver, then rebooted, and my resolution options increased, and the Nvidia settings app functioned normally.
I forget which command I found to run in the terminal, but it verified that I was indeed running 418, so I thought, no big deal, the driver manager is wrong. Oh well. This was early last year. I'd been gaming since then with no issues.

Well, starting a few days ago, games started hard-locking my system. They'd freeze on a single frame, and my keyboard & mouse stopped responding, but the music track would keep playing until the song was over, then nothing. I'd have to reboot from the physical button. It could be a corrupted SSD, it might be RAM, I honestly don't know at this point, but I wanted to rule out a corrupted GPU driver since my system is only freezing up when I play 3D games.

The thing is, I can't switch to the Nouveau driver to completely get rid of Nvidia, because the driver manager won't let me Apply Changes when selecting Nouveau, because it claims I'm already using it. So, I followed some command-line advice I saw on the Ubuntu forums here and there to re-install/reconfigure Nouveau, and then I booted into a low-res desktop.
I ran the command sudo apt-get remove --purge '^nvidia-.*'
When I rebooted again, and tried to install 418 from the Driver Manager from scratch, it immediately jumped from 0% complete to 50%, which means to me, it already had the driver downloaded, and it was installing what it already had cached. That's exactly what I don't want. I want a fresh download.

So, my two questions are:
1) What is wrong with Driver Manager / how do I get it to report my driver version correctly?
2) How do I really, really purge all Nvidia files to ensure I get a fresh download?

[claydoh]

I don't know why it shows Nouveau still, probably a bug, but I haven't looked to see if its been reported.

You don't have to purge Nvidia when switching, just use the driver manger to install a different one, then use apt autoremove to get r9od of any stray packages lwft behind. This in my experience is mainly a thing that happens with using the PPA driver packages, not so much with the stock proprietary driver.

Also, it could be that your card does not like the sooper dooper ultra mega latest-est driver. Try different versions, and use autoremove when switching.


This mess pushed my decision to go AMD when upgrading fom my gtx 1050.

Actually, autoremove might just fix things for you without having to purge everything.
Uninstalling and reinstalling does not often "Fix" things as it can in Windows.



Sent from my LG-H931 using Tapatalk

[bradleypariah]

If autoremove does work, I guess I don't understand how. I was able to finally get back to the Nouveau driver, then reboot, then run autoremove, and it got rid about about 1.1 GB worth of stuff. I rebooted again, yet, as soon as I tried to download the Nvidia 415 driver, once again, the progress bar jumped immediately from 0% to 50%, which tells me the driver was already downloaded, and it was proceeding directly to installation.

Alas, I am fairly certain my problem lies elsewhere. I thank you for your help. I did a wipe and fresh OS install last night, and my system was hard-locking/freezing while just sitting on the desktop, and that was regardless of the driver type.
I almost positively have a faulty component, and I think I need to do a memtest, then start removing/replacing internal components one by one, and just hope it's not an expensive part like the GPU.

Fingers crossed I just need a new RAM stick or an SSD.

Cheers.

[claydoh]

Don't go straight for the ppa driver right off the bat. Try the ones fron the stock repos first. Unless your GPU needs the latest one because it is a super brand new chipset (it isn't)

When they first had the 39x drivers first released, they worked poorly on my gtx 1050. It took a few revisions before it worked well, and had a few known issues that were fixed in subsequent releases. Many of these latest release divers in the PPA are actually beta drivers, I'll bet without looking that the 415 version is a beta.

This happens a LOT with Nvidia drivers.



Yes, apt caches downloads so that you don't have to keep downloading the same thing over and over, say in the case of an interrupted download or installation, and/or lose the internet connection.

[bradleypariah]

After reinstalling the OS last night, I didn't add any repos at all, and it was still crashing just from right-clicking a panel. It's in bad shape. Sad day.

[Snowhog]

Well, rule out 'bad RAM' by selecting the RAM Test from the Grub menu. Let it run, if you can, overnight, or until it reports a bad condition. Other than that, it would be helpful to know about the hardware you are using, as I don't think you've told us, at least not in this thread that I can see. All you've told us is the GPU you have.