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I have a Packard-Bell EasyNote laptop and have recently upgraded from Ubuntu 17.10 to 18.04. The laptop uses the nVidia Optimus system, meaning it has an Intel GPU for most tasks to conserve battery power but for graphic intensive tasks it has a nVidia GeForce GT 540M.

To switch between the GPUs I use the Bumblebee package. Choosing which nVidia driver to use has always been a problem in the past and since I upgraded to 17.04 a year ago I have simply used the builtin Nouveau driver. After reading that the proprietary drivers work under 18.04 I have tried updating to proprietary drivers but nothing seems to work.

~$ ubuntu-drivers devices

returns:

== /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0 ==
modalias : pci:v000010DEd00000DF4sv00001025sd00000512bc03sc00i00
vendor   : NVIDIA Corporation
model    : GF108M [GeForce GT 540M]
driver   : nvidia-340 - distro non-free
driver   : nvidia-304 - third-party free
driver   : nvidia-driver-390 - third-party free recommended
driver   : xserver-xorg-video-nouveau - distro free builtin

But after installing nvidia-driver-390 (using both apt-get from the command line and Synaptic) the command nvidia-smi returns:

NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver. Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running.

I would be extremely grateful if somebody would give a step by step instruction for installing a working nVidia driver.

Organic Marble
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SteveInBavaria
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  • latest supported driver for your card by nvidia is 390.59 http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/134262/en-us – anjanik012 May 19 '18 at 06:28
  • Did you install nvidia-390 ? – anjanik012 May 19 '18 at 06:31
  • Thanks for the replies, I installed nvidia-driver-390 as recommended by "ubuntu-drivers devices". I see that in Synaptic there is a "Transitional package" called nvidia-390, are you recommending to install the Transitional package" called nvidia-390? How would this be different to installing nvidia-driver-390, which didn't work? – SteveInBavaria May 19 '18 at 06:55
  • nvidia driver package has got a new name "from nvidia-390 to nvidia-driver-390" old package acts as a dummy package. https://wiki.debian.org/RenamingPackages and https://askubuntu.com/questions/20377/what-exact-purpose-have-transitional-packages . Installing any one of them should work. Try purging your curring driver then installing "nvidia-390" – anjanik012 May 19 '18 at 07:45
  • You could take a look at it . https://askubuntu.com/questions/927199/nvidia-smi-has-failed-because-it-couldnt-communicate-with-the-nvidia-driver-ma – anjanik012 May 19 '18 at 07:52
  • As I said in the original post installing nvidia-driver-390 results in nvidia-sim reporting "NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver. Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running." Your link is to someone with the same problem but doesn't have a solution. I can't purge my current driver because, as I said, it is the built in nouveau driver but I have run "sudo apt-get purge nvidia*" after every attempt to get a drivr to work. – SteveInBavaria May 19 '18 at 15:43
  • Does this answer your question? How to download all required Ubuntu drivers – karel Sep 17 '23 at 00:06

0 Answers0