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I installed nvidia-390 drivers on my brand new Ubuntu 18.04 installation and now it freezes during the boot screen that appears before the login screen.

I solved the problem by entering recovery mode, update grub ( which enables read-write mode ) and then continue to boot.

However I'd like not to have to enter recovery mode every time I boot my machine. Is there any real solution to this problem?

I'm on an Asus x370 Pro Prime motherboard and my GPU is a GTX Geforce 1070 Ti.

Things I have already done:

  • Secure Boot is already disabled both in BIOS and also through mokutil.

  • Replaced 'quiet splash' by 'quiet splash nomodeset' at
    /etc/default/grub

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18
  • You could check /var/log/Xorg.0.log for any "(EE)" error lines.
    – Gerard H. Pille
    Commented Jun 22, 2018 at 6:17
  • No (EE) lines were found at all. gist.github.com/ruanchaves/0449abf27f1a3c0a726714118d4368b6
    – Ruan
    Commented Jun 22, 2018 at 6:20
  • When it's "frozen", can you still switch to console (CTRL-ALT-F1) ? I would remove the nouveau driver. Does lsmod show nvidia or nouveau?
    – Gerard H. Pille
    Commented Jun 22, 2018 at 6:31
  • lsmod shows only nvidia and no nouveau. As for the console, I'll tell you in a few minutes.
    – Ruan
    Commented Jun 22, 2018 at 6:50
  • Xorg is still loading the nouveau driver, "apt-get remove" it perhaps. Did you follow any installation guide? I'm asking because of the "nomodeset".
    – Gerard H. Pille
    Commented Jun 22, 2018 at 7:19

2 Answers 2

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I've already solved the problem by doing something that's quite hacky, but it worked. If you boot on text mode and then automatically jump to graphical mode then the problem is gone.

I set text mode as the default boot mode ( systemctl set-default multi-user.target ) and then you can set up the command systemctl start graphical.target to automatically run right after startup, or manually run it on text mode every time you need a graphical interface.

After that you can edit your grub files to disable authentication either in text or graphical mode or otherwise you'll have to authenticate twice.

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  • Did you have the problem before you installed the nvidia driver?
    – Gerard H. Pille
    Commented Jun 22, 2018 at 19:09
  • No. It was a brand new install and everything was working perfectly. I've googled around a little bit and this seems to be a common sort of problem after people install nvidia drivers on Debian-based OSes. However this time none of the traditional fixes worked. I believe things would change if I downgraded from nvidia-390.
    – Ruan
    Commented Jun 22, 2018 at 20:11
  • Your workaround looks to me as your problem is with system Dee. Wouldn't touch it with a stick but perhaps there's a "wants" wanting in graphical.target.
    – Gerard H. Pille
    Commented Jun 23, 2018 at 7:04
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This also happened to me after upgrading gdm3 (and in the process reconfiguring systemd). It was working before with the same nvidia-390 driver, which was not touched in the process.

Since downgrading gdm3 did not help, I used Ruan's solution for a little while before reverting back to search for a better solution. I still haven't found one, but realized that changing to another TTY and immediately changing back to TTY1 (or whatever is your graphical TTY) helps for me. Sometimes this has to be repeated a few times, but eventually it will work (at least for me it does).

So hit CTRL+ALT+F2 and then CTRL+ALT+F1. Wait a little to see if it worked, otherwise repeat.

I know that this is a hack rather than a real solution, but it's an immediate aid if you don't want to tamper with systemd's default target.

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  • 1
    How many times are we talking? I'm in the same position, but I never saw this working.
    – Patrick Da Silva
    Commented Aug 15, 2019 at 11:19

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