Score:0

21.10 and Nvidia no longer working, booting to Wayland and Intel graphics

ru flag

I have hade some problems, on and off, with my Dell XPS 7590 and Nvidia. It has an Nvidia 1650 Ti and most of the time it has run fine. From time to time it has failed to use the Nvidia card and started Wayland with the Intel graphics card.

This Friday it did it again and my usual fix of opening Nvidia settings and flip between On-demand and Performance did not work. As it turns out, I am no longer able to start X at all! On the login screen only Wayland is available (and not Ubuntu on Xorg). Sometimes if I set it to On-demand in Nvidia settings it boots in a strange X mode with no X settings available in Nvidia settings.

I also tried to boot an older kernel, 5.13.20 rather than 5.13.21 and then it did give me the option of starting Ubuntu or Gnome on Xorg. It did not really run fine, though, as when I tried to set it to Performance in Nvidia settings, it booted with a black screen.

I have also tried to purge Nvidia and use ubuntu-drivers autoinstall but it does not really work -- either black screen or X just not being available. I tried other versions of the Nvidia driver, but no difference. Running nvidia-smi does show that there are drivers available (it does not give any errors). I have tried sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg but that does not seem to do anything.

I am now out of ideas! I just want my computer to run Xorg with the Nvidia drivers as it did a couple of days ago... Any ideas of what I might try to do?

Score:0
ca flag

hit the Super key (Win logo), start typing
additional drivers
and somewhere during your typing a single icon will appear.

Click that icon and wait a few seconds, the list will fill in with available options.

Now I hope that 21.xx will fill in the same type of choices that I have on my 20.04.
I do expect there to be several choices, the very latest drivers and a few older ones.

Now the remedy might be as simple as:
You might wish to attempt use of one of the older drivers.

NOTE though; if you have any traces of OTHER versions of drivers remaining; these most likely need to be purged.

The "safest" method is to use the same method you used to install it, e.g. With a proprietary driver in a .RUN package you need to add "--uninstall" at the end of the same command you used for the install; AND this is most likely best done from the recovery console.

Recovery console access; boot and tap the ESC key once as the BIOS text has been displayed, a menu should appear...

This might reveal installed nvidia packages;

$ dpkg --list | grep -E ^ii.*nvidia

The pre-pended ii stands for "desIred and Installed"; check dpkg --list | head -n 5

Tobias Andersson Gidlund avatar
ru flag
Sorry for the late reply! I tried to reboot in recovery mode, uninstall everything that has to do with nvidia (using apt purge *nvidia") and reboot. After that, I installed Nvidia (the recommended version) again, but still ended up in Wayland and no way to switch. Unfortunately, I really needed my computer to work and therefore I opted for the least favourable solution -- to reinstall... I simply could not get it to work.
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