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Yesterday I upgraded to 14.04 from 13.10 and wanted to try nvidia-prime. However, I am unable to get it working. The message I am getting when I run 'nvidia-settings' at the command line is as follows:

ERROR: Error querying target relations

** Message: PRIME: No offloading required. Abort
** Message: PRIME: is it supported? no

ERROR: nvidia-settings could not find the registry key file. This file should
   have been installed along with this driver at either
   /usr/share/nvidia/nvidia-application-profiles-331.38-key-documentation
   or /usr/share/nvidia/nvidia-application-profiles-key-documentation. The
   application profiles will continue to work, but values cannot be
   preopulated or validated, and will not be listed in the help text.
   Please see the README for possible values and descriptions.

I tried installing and uninstalling many times following different suggestions that I could find, but apparently I am doing something wrongly as the guy here gets it to work on exactly the same laptop as mine (on 13.10)

Thank you very much

ThunderBiggi
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  • Got the same error today with Nvidia-340 on Ubuntu 14.04 And is not only limited to Ubuntu https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=178539 – madrang Jul 01 '14 at 22:42
  • When dealing with NVIDIA and Optimus try always to shutdown - power off, then power on instead of rebooting. –  Nov 27 '14 at 19:32

2 Answers2

1

Here is a variant of the above, and a solution - for THIS case, possibly helping in the other cases too.

SIDENOTE 1: if you do not run nvidia-settings with gksudo ... THE FIRST TIME (and do not have "$HOME/.config/ibus/" at that time) you will end up seeing:

IBUS-WARNING **: The owner of /home/$USER/.config/ibus/bus is not root!
Then refer back to http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2140352 - then delete the .../ibus/ directory (note NOT .config/) and continue here...

SIDENOTE 2: you may also see: 

** (nvidia-settings:8563): WARNING **: PRIME: Failed to execute child process "/usr/bin/prime-supported" (No such file or directory)
** Message: PRIME: is it supported? no
The remedy is to do 
sudo apt-get install nvidia-prime
... which was BROKEN for some time, but seems to be back "online" again.

SIDENOTE 3: Unless you have e.g. DUMMY like this:

$ tail -n 3 /etc/group
nvidia-persistenced:x:128:

DUMMY:x:65535:
(hrm, that is three lines, even if doesn't look like it) ... then you will NOT have color-profiles loaded for your EXTRA displays - in a multi-display setup - on startup. The problem is the LAST LINE in /etc/group - that group will not "work".

The following has a direct relation to not being able to save changed settings:

$ gksudo nvidia-settings 

ERROR: nvidia-settings could not find the registry key file. This file should have been installed along with this driver at either /usr/share/nvidia/nvidia-application-profiles-337.25-key-documentation or
       /usr/share/nvidia/nvidia-application-profiles-key-documentation. The application profiles will continue to work, but values cannot be preopulated or validated, and will not be listed in the help text. Please see the README for possible
       values and descriptions.

... is that familiar? Then do

sudo bash
...
mkdir -p /etc/nvidia
cd /etc/nvidia
ln -s /etc/alternatives/x86_64-linux-gnu_nvidia_app_profile_keys  nvidia-application-profiles-340.24-key-documentation 
ln -s /etc/alternatives/x86_64-linux-gnu_nvidia_app_profile  nvidia-application-profiles-340.24-rc

Then check that you can see something similar to:

$ ls -l
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 58 jul 12 14:23 nvidia-application-profiles-340.24-key-documentation -> /etc/alternatives/x86_64-linux-gnu_nvidia_app_profile_keys
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 53 jul 12 14:23 nvidia-application-profiles-340.24-rc -> /etc/alternatives/x86_64-linux-gnu_nvidia_app_profile

Note that "-340.24..." and maybe other parts may differ for you (depending on version of the driver), what is shown is after installing the very latest from the xorg-edgers ppa at this writing.

Hannu
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  • https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/coreutils/+bug/1341140 – Hannu Jul 12 '14 at 15:03
  • My case is that I don't have anything related to nvidia in the /etc/alternatives/ or /usr/share/nvidia/ folders. Where should I find the nvidia key? – Xiaodong Qi May 02 '16 at 22:02
  • Try this: sudo updatedeb (let it run through) and then locate followed by a filename you wish to look up. If it is there, it will be found; also parts of filenames will work, but may print more matching files. – Hannu May 09 '16 at 17:59
  • Finally I confirmed my case is due to a conflict with the 4.6 kernel with NVidia-361 driver. Going back to kernel 4.4, it works as expected. Thanks. – Xiaodong Qi May 09 '16 at 22:15
0

I had the same issue until I installed the xorg-edgers ppa.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install <package name>

Also, be sure your bios is switched to Optimus mode.

user68186
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Tom Salfield
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