The installation of the NVIDIA display driver 340 fails in Kubuntu 20.10
This is not a bug. this is an announced EOL which many users (like) may not be aware of. NVIDIA announced that their legacy drivers will not support Linux 5.8. There is a launchpad ticket mentioned below but I don’t think that NVIDIA will look at the ticket and decide to resume support. I don’t think that Kubuntu 20.10 will go back to Linux 5.4 either.
This question is off topic for a while, but you’ve made your point in the preceding comment. If this problem still exists after Ubuntu 20.10 is officially released as I expect it will, please comment and I will vote to reopen this question at that time.
There are no new changes in changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/restricted/n/… so I must assume that the issue still exists in the official release of Ubuntu 20.10.
I just created a live USB stick with Kubuntu 20.10 and the issue can be reproduced by installing nvidia-340 with apt .
Thanks. To be honest I am surprised how little information is circulating about this. For older laptops it means almost no more 3D acceleration, not sure about hardware video decoding. A lot of hardware is going to the bin. Of course this is only NVIDIA’s responsibility. But at least Canonical could warn the users of legacy NVIDIA drivers and recommend to stay on 20.04 LTS.
5 Answers 5
NVIDA ended the support of their Linux legacy drivers earlier this year; specifically with the NVIDIA display driver 340 the last supported Linux kernel is 5.4; newer kernels are not supported.
Kubuntu 20.10 ships with Linux 5.8, which is not supported by the latest NVIDIA display driver 340.108. On the other hand Kubuntu 20.04 has long term support until April 2023 and will continue to work with the NVIDIA display driver (provided you don’t make use of the newer kernel which comes as part of the LTS Enablement Stacks).
Some third parties are trying to patch the NVIDIA display driver 340 to make it work with newer versions of Linux according to this Launchpad ticket. But keeping up with the new Linux version is not trivial (other distributions already decided against it) and the maintenance of a proprietary driver in a GPL context raises some legal issues.
Alternatively one can remove the proprietary driver ( sudo apt-get autoremove —purge nvidia-340 ) and use the built-in driver of the kernel instead (nouveau). My experience is that the 3D and even the 2D acceleration suffer a lot after switching from the proprietary driver to the open source driver. This would be fine with a more powerful GPU but since my GPU is very old and slow I decided to retire it and to replace it with a newer model which comes with recent drivers.
NVIDIA Driver Suddenly Failed (20.04 LTS)
I dual booted my laptop into Ubuntu 20.04 LTS a few months ago. The Ubuntu installation by default installed NVIDIA driver for me, so I could seamlessly use NVIDIA driver and trained model with GPU. Everything was fine until a few days ago I suddenly got the following error when executing nvidia-smi :
NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver. Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running. 
Since then, I couldn’t properly open my NVIDIA X Server GUI, as attached: It also came with other annoying display issues, e.g:
- the screen back lighting was still on even though the screen went black
- the screen failed to resume when it was awaken from suspend mode
- the screen brightness couldn’t be adjusted
All these display issues didnt happen in the past when I installed Ubuntu 20.04.
When checked out Software & Update, I found out the driver strangely fell back to Nouveau display driver (as attached):
I couldn’t switch back to NVIDIA driver listed above. Whenever I attempted to switch, I got the following error:
I was really frustrated by what was happening. I didn’t do any software update so as to minimize the risk of messing up NVIDIA driver, but it still happened at the end.
At last resort, I will reinstall Ubuntu, but before that I would like to look for other alternatives. Really appreciated if you have possible solutions!
Error when installing nvidia-driver-450-server
sudo apt-get install nvidia-driver-450-server Reading package lists. Done Building dependency tree Reading state information. Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: nvidia-driver-450-server : Depends: libnvidia-gl-450-server (= 450.51.06-0ubuntu0.20.04.2) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libnvidia-compute-450-server (= 450.51.06-0ubuntu0.20.04.2) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libnvidia-extra-450-server (= 450.51.06-0ubuntu0.20.04.2) but it is not going to be installed Depends: nvidia-compute-utils-450-server (= 450.51.06-0ubuntu0.20.04.2) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libnvidia-decode-450-server (= 450.51.06-0ubuntu0.20.04.2) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libnvidia-encode-450-server (= 450.51.06-0ubuntu0.20.04.2) but it is not going to be installed Depends: nvidia-utils-450-server (= 450.51.06-0ubuntu0.20.04.2) but it is not going to be installed Depends: xserver-xorg-video-nvidia-450-server (= 450.51.06-0ubuntu0.20.04.2) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libnvidia-cfg1-450-server (= 450.51.06-0ubuntu0.20.04.2) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libnvidia-ifr1-450-server (= 450.51.06-0ubuntu0.20.04.2) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libnvidia-fbc1-450-server (= 450.51.06-0ubuntu0.20.04.2) but it is not going to be installed Recommends: libnvidia-compute-450-server:i386 (= 450.51.06-0ubuntu0.20.04.2) Recommends: libnvidia-decode-450-server:i386 (= 450.51.06-0ubuntu0.20.04.2) Recommends: libnvidia-encode-450-server:i386 (= 450.51.06-0ubuntu0.20.04.2) Recommends: libnvidia-ifr1-450-server:i386 (= 450.51.06-0ubuntu0.20.04.2) Recommends: libnvidia-fbc1-450-server:i386 (= 450.51.06-0ubuntu0.20.04.2) Recommends: libnvidia-gl-450-server:i386 (= 450.51.06-0ubuntu0.20.04.2) E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. Specification
Laptop: Lenovo Legion Y740
OS: Ubuntu 20.04
Kernel: 5.4.0-48-generic
GPU: RTX 2070 Max-Q
Nvidia driver installs but does not load on ubuntu 18.04
Nvidia driver 384 ran well on Ubuntu 17.04 and 17.10. I switched to Ubuntu 18.04 (clean fresh install) and installed nvidia-driver-396 following this great answer Then I installed cuda toolkit 9.2 using .run file. It failed to install with and without choosing to install nvidia driver along with it. Rebooted and tried again, then cuda was installed succesfully. But nvidia isn’t running.
$ nvidia-settings ERROR: NVIDIA driver is not loaded ERROR: Unable to load info from any available system $ nvidia-smi NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver. Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running. $ lspci -v | grep VGA 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 5500 (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) - Uninstalled nvidia ( nvidia-uninstall ) Successful but with warning: «Some symlinks could not be removed. The I removed cuda with rm -rf /usr/local/cuda* and installed nvidia-driver-396 but still the same error
- Removed nvidia-396, installed 396 from nvidia’s website (.run file). It started with a warning «Distribution provided pre-script failed». I proceeded and installation was successful. It also added nouveau to blacklist automatically. Still same result as 1.
- Uninstalled previous one, removed blacklist entry, installed nvidia-390 Still same result
- Uninstalled previous one, installed it from «Additional drivers» from GUI. No change.
- Went to console mode. Stopped gdm. Then installed 396. No change. Installed 390 likewise. No change.
- Tried using xorg-edgers ppa (Yes its is said they are same as graphics-drivers ppa but I am desperate now) Unmet dependency problems. So reverted to removed everything.
- Uninstalled everything, went to recovery mode then installed nvidia-driver-390. No luck.
- I felt nvidia driver from official website made some irrevesible changes. So tried installing it again so that I can uninstall it properly from recovery mode as suggested in the great answer using —unistall option. But now it fails to install. Error message says nouveau is running despite being blacklisted. I removed the blacklist entry later
I have Intel i5 with Intel HD graphics along with Nvidia GeForce 940M. Yes nvidia-prime was installed. Dual booted with Windows 10, Secure Boot is disabled
During all these steps, once I was able to start the nvidia x server app, though the nvidia-smi gave the same error. Once there was a resolution issue when cuda ran nvidia-xconfig. I removed the xorg.conf to fix it. Right now my pc has nouveau running, no other drivers installed, no blacklisting nvidia, no xorg.conf.
Can someone help. I don’t see any reason why it should not work. nvidia driver 390.12 is reported to work well with kernel 4.15 but still it is not working on mine.