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I'm trying to install the latest NVIDIA drivers for my GTX 965M Refresh on a Skylake board. I run Ubuntu MATE 16.04 with the stock kernel 4.4.0.

I added the graphics PPA. Now when I select any of the NVIDIA drivers under "additional drivers" in system settings, it does install them correctly, but the system won't boot anymore.

I tried 375.26, 370.28 and 367.57 with kernel 4.4.0, 4.4.39 and also 4.8 - same issue with all of them. The system freezes right after selecting a kernel in GRUB (blinking underscore cursor at the left top of the screen) and it doesn't write anything to syslog or kern.log that could help me figure out what the issue is about.

I disabled secure boot in BIOS. I use UEFI mode. I disabled the second onboard video card in the BIOS settings too, so that shouldn't be conflicting. And yes, I did purge nvidia-* several times before installing other drivers. I also tried manually setting nomodeset in my GRUB config, but no luck.

Any ideas how the heck I could debug this or what else I could try?

Update 1: I tried booting Manjaro in nonfree mode (which loads proprietary drivers automatically) from a pen drive and guess what? It works without issues and the card uses the nvidia driver. Manjaro currently uses Xorg 1.18.4 and kernel 4.4.x, (almost) same as Ubuntu 16.04. Now I know it's not related to the kernel version, the NVIDIA driver version, the xserver version, a BIOS setting or secure boot, but what the heck could it be related to then?

John Wayne
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  • Disable Secure Boot in BIOS. – Pilot6 Jan 02 '17 at 10:21
  • I think you didn't read my message careful enough. Secure boot is disabled already and NVIDIA drivers work fine with Arch on the same system, so this is something related to Ubuntu (or just the MATE edition), I just can't seem to figure out what exactly. – John Wayne Jan 02 '17 at 11:54
  • Arch kernel does not enforce Secure Boot. – Pilot6 Jan 02 '17 at 12:22
  • Could you elaborate? If secure boot is disabled in BIOS, how can Ubuntu boot at all if it enforces secure boot? – John Wayne Jan 02 '17 at 15:49
  • Ubuntu is signed and it can boot. The Nvidia driver is not signed and it can't load with SB enabled. See http://askubuntu.com/questions/762254/why-do-i-get-required-key-not-available-when-install-3rd-party-kernel-modules/762255#762255 – Pilot6 Jan 02 '17 at 17:01
  • But secure boot is disabled in my BIOS. The Q/A you linked clearly states that unsigned kernel modules work if secure boot is disabled in BIOS. Is it possible that UEFI somehow overrides what's set in the BIOS? – John Wayne Jan 02 '17 at 19:31
  • If SB is disabled, the module should load. If SB is disabled, then the problem is somewhere else. – Pilot6 Jan 02 '17 at 19:32
  • SB is disabled and actually was disabled by default with the BIOS on my system, I checked several times because the above issue indeed seemed like something on UEFI/BIOS level was preventing the kernel modules from loading. – John Wayne Jan 02 '17 at 20:02

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Solution: I ditched Ubuntu and its derivates and moved to Arch based distros. I chose Manjaro KDE to be specific and it works absolutely fine with my hardware running kernel 4.9 and latest NVIDIA drivers - no issues whatsoever. Goodbye Ubuntu.

Alternative Solution (possibly): Pretty much the only root cause that makes sense is that even though I had secure boot disabled in BIOS, it was still enabled somehow (BIOS bug or UEFI overriding BIOS settings, I don't know). Unfortunately I had already moved to Manjaro before I could try this solution (the mokutil one) which may or may not had solved my issue.

Community
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John Wayne
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