change to already installed gpu driver via console

[Fred-VIE]

Hello, I have tried a higher gpu driver version, because one of my games didnt start and supposedly a newer driver should help.

After choosing the nvidia 550 driver in the driver manager and a restart ofc Kubuntu did not start anymore.

Now the challenge is to activate the 535 driver again but I cannot find a way.

I read that simply installing the driver activates it but that did not work because it said "driver already installed".
Then I read that the driver can be switched by using jockey-text -e xorg.nvidia-current. That gave me an unknown command error and I learned, that Ubuntu does not install that package anymore.

Then I tried to uninstall the driver that is not working anyways by using sudo apt-get rm nvidia-drivername-number hoping Kubuntu would just use another one. After restarting it stopped loading again.

Then I tried to rename the xorg.config which prompted that the file is not there (under /etc/x11/xorg.conf)

So the question remains: How can I activate gpu driver that is already installed? I didnt think it would be that hard to just switch drivers but apparently it is because all I found is howto install it but not howto switch to a already installed driver.

Thanks

[Fred-VIE]

I was about to un-/reinstall all NV-drivers but when I tried the console kept freezing/crashing so I had no other possibility than to run a repair again (did that already after the unsuccessful driver install).

After that repair it prompted to restart and continued to boot into Kubuntu again. It now shows that the NV driver version 550.120 is installed and the driver manager says that a manually installed driver is used.

Tbh. I have no clue why it did not work after installing and repairing when it did not boot anymore.
Also I uninstalled this driver in the console before the last repair thus I have no idea why it is now active. Probably because I could not figure out howto activate another driver in the console and the repair seems to have reinstalled it (and done something else since it is working now).

I would still very much like to know howto switch drivers in the console since that will for sure come up again in the near future.

[skyfishgoo]

running the utilities in grub usually saved me from having to resort to more drastic actions

from my notes when i had a nvidia card

#
#
#++>> when kernel updates go wrong it's likely because of nvidia drivers <<++
#
#
#to install/update nvidia drivers (brute force option)
#write down the tty terminal steps in the 2nd part below with the appropriate driver number
sudo apt update
sudo apt purge *nvidia*
sudo apt autoremove
reboot
#at this point machine can only boot to a tty terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F2) as there are no drivers
login with user name and password to enter the following line
sudo apt install nvidia-driver-535 nvidia-settings
reboot
#after reboot it may still require booting to recovery mode
#use the dpkg tool to clean up and finish the install

[Fred-VIE]

Thank you, I have noted that down.
It seems like I have wasted 5 hours on switching a driver in Linux for a game, that got patched the same day. Well I guess that is part of the Linux experience, when one is impatient

running the utilities in grub usually saved me from having to resort to more drastic actions

sudo apt purge *nvidia*
sudo apt autoremove

Thats what I found and wanted to do when the recovery console started crashing.

I guess that purge command also works for just one specific driver?

#use the dpkg tool to clean up and finish the install

is that the sudo apt autoremove again or something else?

It is alarming, that noone seems to know howto switch to another already installed driver thus I wonder why they are installed in the first place. If there is no (easy) way to switch, in case something goes wrong, via the console it would be better if they would not be preinstalled.

[skyfishgoo]

it's easy to switch in the GUI software center ... but you need to be able to get to the desktop and that only works if the current driver is working, so it's kind of a catch 22

there is another utility in the grub "advanced" menu to clean up the packages that were not installed correctly, then you can use the one that runs autoremove to make more room (have to reboot between each one).

for me, when i wrote that, it was a bad update that pushed a non-working version of my current nivida driver so i had to go nuclear on ALL niviida driver and start over with the free driver so i could get to the GUI software center and start again.

but if you know the name of the driver package, you can just use apt to reinstall it from a tty and reboot... if you picked the right one it should work.

[Fred-VIE]

It seems I have to do that now anyways because with the current driver I get 40 % cpu load which usually is at around 10 % watching a PiP vid and nv x-server app isnt displaying everything anymore. It was gone but after a reinstall it still has just half the info's it had before. Also greenwithenvy cannot start since something is missing. I had the problem with the high CPU-load already switching GPU drivers.

Also there is no choice to change to another driver in the driver manager anymore.

Thanks for helping!

[Fred-VIE]

I did the purge rebooted, tried to install the 535 driver but it said that it couldnt reach the archive link in my country. Can the archive be changed in the console to fetch them from somewhere else?

Also I dont know what you meant with "use the dpkg tool to clean up"

Repair, sudo apt-get install update, ubutnu-drivers install is what I tried after. When I start it says something about nuveau timeout and the monitor turns off (no signal).

I got all the drivers that I had before (prolly due to the ubuntu-drivers install command) but the start fails.

So I am back where I started, just with a different message during boot.

edit: I figured it out. I didnt get that I had to use the strg+alt+f2 at that point when the monitor turned off, to start the console. When I installed the driver there and rebooted it worked.

Although I do not get why it did not work in the recovery console, everything I did there was pointless. I purged the nv drivers, checked after and the drivers were there. Makes no sense to me.

[skyfishgoo]

in the discover > settings > software sources > ubuntu tab, you can change the repository mirror to another location to see if it finds the driver you are looking for

the grub options appear under the advanced menu for the kernel you are trying to run... there are a handful of utilities there you can run to clean up your system ... one is for creating more room (leads to autoremove) , and there's another for fixing broken packages (leads to a dpkg command).

if that doesn't work you can try booting to a previous kernel as well, sometimes that will circumvent the recent changes that borked everything.