Trouble with installing Nvida 390 driver on Ubuntu 18.10

[roadrash]

I think all the posts that 23dornot23d has given you should have worked.
But installing incorrect driver then creates more issues.
I would only install the one correct driver for whichever nVidia recommends for your card. And you have two cards that need different drivers.
If you change drivers you must purge, or the nuclear option of a new clean install.
And be sure to purge everything related to nVidia including bumblebee & xorg configuration files.
Then check if nVidia fully installer with this, as it must be part of kernel.
dkms status

Then you must not use nomodeset as that is telling system not to use any driver.

Ok did everything you suggested oldfred. Here are the steps I took & resultes:

1) opened teminal - apt-get purge nvidia*
2) checked for xorg,config - none
2) opened driver mangager and installed Nvidia 340.
3) dkms status confirmed Nvida driver installed.
4) reboot
5) At startup press "e" and check script - I found nomodeset was present so I removed it and pressed F10 to continue.
6) Starts to boot but stalls before desktop with the usual waiting for a process (see picture)
7) Pressed reset
8) Entered Recovery mode root terminal and did dkms status and nvidia driver still loaded (see picture) (Stupid picture uploader wont upload picture for some rteason)
anyhow it says: NVIDIA-340, 340.107, 4.15.0-42-generic, x86_64: installed
9) Now what??

[23dornot23d]

Its stopped on gdm .......... ( so its the wayland problem now ..... )

I think I managed to break out of this once too using Ctrl+alt+escape repeatedly - to get to a console login ... Ctrl+alt+F1
( you could nearly always break out here before Systemd was implemented )
But it looks like it might work this time ....... ...... if the driver is ok ....... and you can get to load lightdm up ....

Option 2 - at boot ..... Advanced options ..... go in safe mode ........ but do not remove anything now .....

Load up lightdm ....... ( one step at a time ) .....

sudo apt install lightdm

see if when you reboot it gets past the gdm problem ...... really should have had lightdm in place before the boot process was initiated that last time.

[roadrash]

I tried that but for some reason when try to install lightdm from the root terminal it complains it cant find some packages and suggest adding --fix-missing to the comand. Ive had this hapen quite a few times. But if i try to install telhe same item from a desktop terminal it finds everything.

[23dornot23d]

Yes - maybe the network is not connected at this point ..... sorry to say

Unless you can get in from the boot menu 2nd option Advanced options .... then the second option on there .... safe mode or whatever it is called.

or Old Fred is still on and can see any other ways to get past the problem you have ........

Try again tomorrow ........ but load lightdm up before reboot and see what happens ...... see post #125 ....

or we can have a go when we are both on ..... needs a clean install then load/setup lightdm ..... then we will see if the driver will load in ok

I prefer to load mate then go into additional drivers to select the nvidia card too ..... but if you can get to additional drivers from another desktop
environment - then that is your choice - as god only knows how many times you have been through the routine now ...... suppose you could do
it all in your sleep at the moment too,

[CatKiller]

I prefer to load mate then go into additional drivers to select the nvidia card too

Installing with apt from the terminal will give more information. We had at least one report in the thread of the driver installation being hard terminated because of a lack of information about what the install scripts were doing at that point.

[23dornot23d]

I tell you what CatKiller ..... you describe exactly how you would like to do it ..........

your turn now ...... please give the commands you want to see the OP do.

I will sit it out again .......

[CatKiller]

I tell you what CatKiller ..... you describe exactly how you would like to do it ..........

your turn now ...... please give the commands you want to see the OP do.

I will sit it out again .......

Nah, you're good. I think I gave my suggestions a few pages back. More information is better than less information, that's all.

[23dornot23d]

More information is better than less information, that's all.

Yes you are right ..... the logs give the clues to what to do next .......

One thing that seems to keep happening is the lock up before getting into the desktop manager .......

But the cause was shown last time to be possibly be gdm ..... then maybe the devs know exactly why it would do that.

If it could be programmed to post the log back for the user automatically to a pastebin for use on the forum - that would be good.

Maybe .... the error is easy to find ....... but so far everytime it gets to using the screen driver for nvidia - it stalls or goes on hold.

@CatKiller .... your comments are useful .... but more information would also be good to find out exactly what commands could be
used to get to information after the on permanent hold appears on the screen - its something I do not know enough about.

the journalctl --boot ........... looks interesting ...... if it can give information directly to the user for posting after the computer
gets to the point of no return ....... in a format ...... or one simple command that the user can type in to put the information onto the forum.

knowing how to use systemd and get the information required out of it - at hold ...... many times now the threads show the graphics
problems for Nvidia GTX cards ..... maybe its just these cards with GTX ..... so is the driver not quite right yet.

Maybe only a dev could answer that and know exactly how to track down what is going on when it is possibly a graphics driver failure.

Which seems to be increasingly looking like the case after all of these posts .....

If we do a search on nvidia gtx ubuntu solved - we will see how many have been solved ....

This search probably also shows the consistency of problems with that type of gtx card -
seeing so many seem to be having to find solutions for
these cards ...

[CatKiller]

@CatKiller .... your comments are useful .... but more information would also be good to find out exactly what commands could be
used to get to information after the on permanent hold appears on the screen - its something I do not know enough about.

The install scripts would generally add the nvidia kernel module and blacklist the others. That hasn't been happening. Using the graphical tools hides a lot of useful information to make it friendlier. At the point the OP interrupted it, the script could have been doing something, or it could have a problem we can fix, or it could have hung as the OP thought. There's no way to know, because it's hidden.

Running an apt install from the command line reveals that information. That's the beginning and end of my point there.

If the OP has another computer they can SSH from, that might be useful, too. That way, they wouldn't need to reset everything to be able to post information here. The terminal output and logs would be displayed on an unaffected machine.

[roadrash]

Hate to say it we are no further forward and I eneded up having to do yet another complete re-install. Basically when after I installed the Mate desktop through recovery mode I could not find a way of switching from the default Gnome to Mate. Normally its done by logging out and logging into Mate from the login screen but there is no way to do it from a terminal. I spent hours today trying to do its searching the we everywhere but it seems there is no simple way. Anyway after the re-install I did everything again and had the nvidia driver showing as installed and then installed mate desktop and logged out of gnome and into mate desktop & then installed lightdm. I then rebooted and check in recovery mode root terminal if the nviida driver was still there ad it was. So I carried oin andf rebooted only to be greeted with the usual black screen with little cursuor flasging which we know now is that dumb waiting for a process to finish message.
It seems we cant get to any graphical desktop with the driver installed.
Look I wonder can we try this with the nvidia 304 driver as we have had it working in earler ubuntu xenial. Can you tell me how I get the driver to show in driver manager?