NVIDIA Graphics Issue - New GPU install

Though it's likely I'll perform a reinstall of Linux Mint 17.1, am asking for some feedback to find a quick (not 2-3 days long) fix. 

 

The problem, though my new MSI GTX 960 is performing wonderfully on my Windows installs, am having issues with my Mint 17.1 MATE install. At the boot screen, on a 24" monitor, the boot options are like HUGE. It doesn't settle down until I'm signed in & it didn't do that until I ran a fix for that, it was the latest driver, yet for a later OS. I didn't see the part about 14.04 or earlier until after the driver was installed, yet 346.59 is the latest Linux NVIDIA driver. 

 

http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2015/04/install-nvidia-driver-346-59-in-ubuntu-from-ppa/

 

In case anyone misses the Terminal commands near the bottom of the above page, these were what I ran. 

 

 

 

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mamarley/nvidia

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install nvidia-346

 

Performed 'sudo reboot' afterwards, and though the boot screen was still overly huge, the login is fine & can browse good. Yet there's another issue, no NVIDIA configuration panel, I want to be able to monitor things, if it weren't for the fact that I ran the command, wouldn't know which card is installed. There isn't even a reference to it in the Driver Manager. Not even to change to whatever the non-branded NVIDIA driver is. 

 

I downloaded the graphics driver straight from the NVIDIA site, but there was an error to run it. Even if ran by Administrator. A page opened to the left, part in red, something to do with localities. 

 

Yet it's a great card I runs cool (check out my Speccy link in my updated specs). And finally this, the day I've waited for for years, a GPU that nets a perfect score on Windows. 

 

 

And even 8.1 is great as well. How about that, a WEI of 8.1 for 8.1.

 

 

So if I have to perform a reinstall, that's OK, as I can in about 3 hours total, if anyone knows how to fix this w/out reinstall, that would be better. At the same time, this isn't going to be a 5 page discussion (unless a clean install leads to other issues). 

 

If it matters, am connected by DisplayPort. The rest of my hardware is in my Speccy specs, it's current, as of yesterday. 

 

Any responses are appreciated.

 

Cat

Edited by cat1092, 16 April 2015 - 02:20 AM.

At least I now have a NVIDIA Control Panel, only here it's called 'NVIDIA X Server Settings'.

 

Have toyed with it & figured out how to change the power levels, not wanting to run at max performance all the time, yet wanted more than Level 1, changed to Adaptive, this boosts as much as needed, demonstrated by playing with Google Earth a bit. 

 

Yet the same issue persists at startup, a very large text, did boot into Recovery Mode, which offered to clean up some packages, accepted, yet still didn't fix the large text issue. 

 

I'll have to say though, that new driver is awesome!

 

Cat

You followed these instructions?

 

http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2015/01/install-nvidia-346-35-ubuntu-1404/

Yet the same issue persists at startup, a very large text

Does this happen at the boot menu, or after the system boots?

could it be that you have defaulted to the basic (nouveau) drivers etc..   Check the Xorg.conf and see if it is showing the right details for everything...  just a rush of blood made me think of that...

 

Yet the same issue persists at startup, a very large text

Does this happen at the boot menu, or after the system boots?

 

 

At the Boot Menu. Once the system boots, the display seems to be fine. Yet there are missing pieces, such as no driver is use when I know there is. 

 

Have cleaned up the AMD packages that were installed after that card was installed, but didn't bother with any of the default packages. There was one broken package, and ran some commands that was found on a Ubuntu page to clean up any. Now at least there's none broken. 

 

Did boot from install media & ran a Live session, it was worse than before I installed the driver that I did. Tried a different DisplayPort connection (there are three), to no avail. Even tried updating the Live OS, it updated, yet I didn't leave room for a persistence file on the Flash drive, so those updates may have been in memory only. Will try that again & ticking the box for Persistence file. 

 

Maybe I should enable 'multi-display' (dual graphics) mode in the BIOS, place the DP cable in the inbuilt (Intel HD 4600) display, and going from there? Install using native Intel display & then connect to the card & install drivers. Am not throwing in the towel yet, at the same time am not going to play with this for days. 

 

 

could it be that you have defaulted to the basic (nouveau) drivers etc..   Check the Xorg.conf and see if it is showing the right details for everything...  just a rush of blood made me think of that.

 

 

 

No, I don't believe so, it was only when the drivers were installed per the Terminal commands in my OP, the display finally displayed properly. And the NVIDIA X Server Settings. Just looked in the Package Manager, there are 4 installed. Were 5, I removed Bumblebee. Am not sure how to check the Xorg.conf directly. Should I remove these? 

 

 

Here's the NVIDIA X Server Settings snapshot to show the installed driver. 

 

 

 

Plus, I don't want the Nouveau drivers, just the NVIDIA ones, for the best control over the system. Have a notebook with dual graphics & am forced to use that crappy driver, along with Bumblebee, because I can't disable the Intel HD graphics in the BIOS & there are conflicts when installing the NVIDIA drivers. I suppose it has to do with the way notebooks & AIO type PC's are built. The discrete card is a soldered on chip, though I don't understand why the OEM's in the case of dual graphics, doesn't provide an option to disable the one in the CPU. Maybe they're too cheap to provide a different BIOS for these models. Surely it can be done. 

 

This is starting to get me ticked, the card was manufactured in January, it's now mid-April, and the Mint (& other Linux) devs should have fixed this by now. It's not like it's just me running the card, it's beginning to overshadow some of the success of the 750 Ti models that has yet to peak, and NVIDIA has released this as a solid, reliable mid-class card, rather than budget, which is why I went with it over the 750 Ti, which is a budget model. The GTX 960 is getting more popular by the day, with OC & SC cards being the most purchased of the version. Some consumers has reported installing it in earlier Alienware systems with only a 330W PSU with success. 

 

As an unexpected bonus, it's also the coolest running component in my system, showing at 27C at this moment. Of course, when I fire up a VM, it rises a bit, yet that's to be expected. 

 

I just want it to run with the same level of success it does on Windows. On those, after physically installing the card, plugged the DP cable in the first port, installed GeForce Experience, and it installed the latest "Grand Theft V' ready driver w/out me having to click anything until the driver was downloaded. 

 

 

It's not a lot to expect to have a properly working GPU. $200 isn't easy to come by for me, that was 4 months of stashing $50 for future upgrades & this isn't the end. 

 

The i7-4790K is next & last on the list.

 

Cat

Edited by cat1092, 16 April 2015 - 06:43 PM.

Well one thing's for certain, I can boot into Live media with the DP cable connected to the Intel HD 4600 graphics, and all shows good. This post is being created while running the Live media, haven't updated the persistence file.

 

No matter what, I couldn't boot into Mint with decent (barely usable) grahpics on the DP of the NVIDIA card. 1024x768 is all it would do on a monitor that runs at 1920x1080 natively. The Intel graphics are performing as supposed to be, though am not going to keep things that way. This is only a test.

 

Is this the way that a native install would turn out? My options, as I see it, may boil down to two. Install on the Intel graphics & do the drivers on the card afterwards, or install from the NVIDIA card & hope that Mint installs the drivers to get me going, which at first would be the Nouveau ones mentioned above. Either way, something is wrong with the install on the SSD & it has to be fixed. Have already booted into the mode from the GRUB menu which cleans up things to no avail.

 

Anyone on here with dual graphics that has an answer? I sure don't want to perform two reinstalls, if it can be helped.

 

Cat

Edited by cat1092, 16 April 2015 - 07:53 PM.

You followed these instructions?

 

http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2015/01/install-nvidia-346-35-ubuntu-1404/

 

No I haven't Nick, because it's an earlier driver. Can I substitute the numbers for the driver that I have downloaded already?

 

And will most certainly try this on my notebook, once this one's figured out.

 

Cat

Edited by cat1092, 16 April 2015 - 08:10 PM.

yes

Then I'll go for that.

 

Rather than printing this, will just pull up the page on a notebook to guide me, as there's no way I'll be able to remember all of those steps.

 

And if by chance my install becomes broken or it fails to produce the desired effect, have seen on this page (link below) where all modern Linux distros has NVIDIA support, enough to [hopefully] get me going. Though will make the effort to my current install to work. Seen that I can also add the latest Linux Kernel, which improves DP audio support, on the same page you linked. But I'll take this one step at a time.

 

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_nforce_1.23.html

 

No wonder Linux installs runs so good, many performs a fresh one one a year.

 

Thanks for the efforts provided so far!

 

Cat

 

No wonder Linux installs runs so good, many performs a fresh one one a year.

Just because drivers are broken is usually no reason to re install, Just remove the drivers, and start again.

 

Something like this.

sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-*

This is where terminal comes in handy, and you can boot linux into terminal.

Boot directly into terminal - no GUI - Linux Mint Community

 

Ubuntu 14.04, 13.10: Boot into Text Mode / Console ...

Edited by NickAu, 16 April 2015 - 09:11 PM.

Well, I've bit the bullet and in no better shape than before, still had to install the same driver, using the same instructions (BTW, which is the latest stable) to make the new card work. And still staring at an XXL GRUB boot menu, though to it's credit, the Linux Mint symbol goes by like a flash, have to be looking for it to see, it's that fast. I did find some things that weren't working as should, some of which I suspected to be the case, the cleanup utility got rid of a lot of broken stuff, not just GPU drivers. 

 

Am not a happy camper with the results though, the trick using EasyBCD 2.2 that I've used for a few years to bypass the GRUB menu didn't work, it could be because of clean install of 8.1 recently, tried twice & it didn't work. Maybe I need to save all of the folders of importance from my /home partition & begin fresh (then restore the 12 folders back one by one), as I suspect these 'fresh upgrades' are catching up with me, the /home came from Mint 13, then 15, 16, 17 & finally 17.1 is there. Don't know what else is there other than the folders I see, yet I've done a lot of installing/uninstalling & reinstalling of some things I cannot possibly remember. If these files aren't on the root partition (which I format every time) nor visible in the folders that I can view, where in the heck are all of these hiding? 

 

For example, my wallpaper was already there, as always after one of these installs, as well as a few panel items. Probably some junk that I no longer need nor use anymore as well. 

 

That however is not going to make my card work out of the box, the reason 'why' I performed the re-install was because of an inaccurate article above. Not even the Nouveau drivers were working properly. And yet it still shows that 'No proprietary drivers are in use', though I know dang well there are. 

 

My patience with these type of issues are wearing thin. I don't believe this is solely an NVIDIA issue, nor MSI. That clean driver install was just something that I lucked across & wasn't paying attention that it applied to later Ubuntu based versions than 14.04 (all of the Mint 17 releases are & will be based on that OS). Otherwise, I'd have ignored it & kept on looking. 

 

The only thing that I regret about this install, was that out of my normal practice, didn't image the drive first. Now, unless I can find a cat to pull out of the bag, am going to be stuck looking that that monster sized GRUB screen every time I boot the PC. Though I believe it can be fixed with a partition tool, resetting the MBR. 

 

I need to make up my mind on whether or not will perform a complete, clean install, and pray that if I do, that there's nothing I don't see in those 12 folders that will follow me once they're dropped back into the /home partition. The 'hidden' things that was mentioned above. If the root is formatted, then there's a well hidden folder in the /home. I believe there's a 500GiB HDD that I can spare for the partition, the 175GiB partition is very full. 

 

And still these drivers to fight. If this one is working, what's wrong with continuing to use it? So what if it says 'Ubuntu 14.10 or higher', as long as it works? 

 

Though I believe the re-install was needed, the entire OS is more responsive. 

 

Cat

And still staring at an XXL GRUB boot menu

It might be an idea to reinstall Grub to see if that fixes the problem. I reinstall Grub fairly regularly on Kubuntu as an easy way to get Kubuntu back to the top of the boot menu, after installing other operating systems (and Grub) to my spare partition.

To install (or reinstall) Grub from a working system, assuming it's installed to the MBR on sda:

sudo grub-install /dev/sda

then:

sudo update-grub

There's no need to uninstall Grub beforehand.

(EDIT: command is update-grub and not grub-update)

Edited by Al1000, 17 April 2015 - 03:31 AM.

Al, to to honest, am not quite sure where Grub is installed, I aimed it to the Windows 7 partition, evidently didn't install there. Because the PC now boots to the Grub menu, and there nothing I can do with EasyBCD 2.2 to fix it. 

 

I have reason to believe, especially after a fresh install, it's a driver issue. It was displaying like that before & after re-installing Mint 17.1, so it's either the drivers, OS, or a combination of both. My plans are to install a 500GiB HDD just for /home & Swap, and the entire OS will be cleanly installed, rather than what's known as a 'fresh upgrade', keeping /home & Swap as is. Or upgrading from the current 500GiB HDD to a 1TiB one. That's not what I want to do, yet may have to. Because the new card makes some of a SATA ports hard to access, especially the last empty one.    

 

Cat                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Edited by cat1092, 17 April 2015 - 03:58 AM.

I aimed it to the Windows 7 partition

I take it you mean that you aimed it at the MBR of the storage media that Windows is on, as Grub won't install to a Windows file system (/partition).

I didn't realise that you had already reinstalled Mint. I thought you had just reinstalled the driver.

Grub would be (re)installed by default when you reinstalled Mint anyway.

Did you notice where Grub was installed to when you reinstalled Mint? Whenever I've installed Mint, Grub has been installed (by default) to /dev/sda.