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Re: What went wrong with my GeForce GTX 1050 Ti driver installation?



On 06/02/2018 17:08, Erkko Lahnajärvi wrote:
Hi,


I fetched a new computer few days ago. The equipment are:

Motherboard: Gigabyte AB350-Gaming
CPU: Amd Ryzen 3 1300x
RAM: 16Gb
Video card: GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
Hard disk: WD green 240 Gb

On this computer I installed Debian-9.3.0-amd64.
I've first tried to install the video card. I found a particular driver for
Linux from Ndivia's website. And then I bigan to install it... It didn't
work so I asked your help via email yesterday.  You gave me this kind of a
guide:

"Hi, you really don't need to download drivers from Nvidia website, it is
quite the opposite since doing so will probably result in a much less
stable system and difficulty to update.

Start by reading the relevant Debian documentation [1], your card is fully
supported by the Nvidia driver available in Debian 9 [2] so you are in luck!
All you need is to add "non-free" to your /etc/apt/sources.list file, and
install the package "linux-headers-amd64" and "nvidia-driver". See link
[1], it's all explained there."

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

[2] http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/375.66/RE
ADME/supportedchips.html

--------------------------------------
I reinstalled "stretch" and then I followed the instructions you gave. With
one little exception. I added also the "contrib" to every line after
"main". That was the guide of the link.

After that the rest of the installation seemed to go well. Then I rebooted
and all I confronted was empty dark screen. Computer still had the power
on.  I didn't get any further.

Now I have reinstalled Debian again. What should I do to make my video card
running?



Hi, you are on the right track, but next time don't reinstall from zero if you get a black screen, it is most likely fixable.

You probably missed the step where you need to create a "xorg.conf" file:

"Configuration

As the nvidia driver is not autodetected by Xorg, a configuration file is required to be supplied.[...]

Automatic

Install the nvidia-xconfig package, then run it with sudo. It will automatically generate a Xorg configuration file at /etc/X11/xorg.conf"

That's the relevant info from [1]. In short you need to install the "nvidia-xconfig" package, and run it without any option or argument as root (or using "sudo"):

sudo nvidia-xconfig


and check that you now have a file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.


As an added measure you can blacklist "nouveau" which is the free driver for Nvidia but unfortunately often struggles to work or keep up with new hardware. (Short story, Nvidia is not helping and developers have to reverse-engineer the driver, not an easy task). I think it is done for you upon installation of the Nvidia driver, but you can do it manually by adding a file in /etc/modprobe.d directory, for example create a file named "blacklist-nouveau.conf" with this content:

blacklist nouveau

and apply the change with:

sudo update-initramfs -u -k all

It is also possible to add a kernel boot parameter if you get a black screen like you did, in grub edit the kernel boot entry by pressing the "e" key, and add this at the end of the "linux" line:

nouveau.modeset=0 modprobe.blacklist=nouveau


Hope you get it to work this time.


[1] https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#configure


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