frustrating weekend spent trying to stabilise this PC booting with 17.10 (which surely must be one of most common laptop choices for Ubuntu! so not too surprised people give up and buy MACs in the end!)
I'm posting this as more of a solution than a question, but the combination of kernel versions and cmdline options seems so delicate, am then afraid to upgrade anything.....(maybe 18.04 will be stable on this pc)
ok hardware Dell XPS 15 9560, i7-7700HQ CPU @ 2.80GHz
Bios 1.3.4,
QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile
Intel graphics
dual booted with Win10 (that part runs fine)
I wanted in particular 2 things to work:
1) the machine recognises a 2nd monitor/projector (via HDMI) for presentations
2) suspend/resume works (running a VM which I don't want to reboot , reconfig etc)
I previously installed 16.04 on the machine , and although this worked fine, but neither (1) nor (2) above worked, suspend works but resume rebooted to a black screen (no messages).
so Upgraded to 17.10 (via upgrade not clean reinstall)
here the fun started, tried to install nvidia-384 via Software and Updates panel. also added sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa to get bigger choice in nvidia drivers (can see nvida-384, nvidia-387, nvidia-390 available)
seems cmd line acpi_rev_override=1 seems important from multiple posts but many issues not even booting to a login screen, screen flashing with text often errors seen with ACPI Exception, AE_NOT_FOUND (whenever see this it won't complete boot) screen booting to text with a few purple lines across it, but dropped back to root
Only way to solve that temporarily was to get to a root shell at boot and apt remove nvidia* apt purge nivdia*
and then boot via Recovery (cmdline added: nomodeset), which in my case always seems to require me to complete a fsck before resuming boot. (?)
then machine would boot to (Ubuntu on XOrg) , nouveau driver running for nvidia. gdm3 display manager
Also tried using Lightdm , boot ok as above (in recovery mode as ever) but no 2nd monitor or suspend/resume (suspend works, but resume brings up a black screen)
Tried more recent kernels, no luck even tried 4.15.3 and nvidia-390 as saw a post this was working, but not in my case
So , THE COMBINATION I FOUND TO WORK IS :
dpkg -l | grep nvidia
ii nvidia-384 384.111-0ubuntu0.17.10.1 amd64 NVIDIA binary driver - version 384.111
ii nvidia-opencl-icd-384 384.111-0ubuntu0.17.10.1 amd64 NVIDIA OpenCL ICD
ii nvidia-prime 0.8.5 amd64 Tools to enable NVIDIA's Prime
ii nvidia-settings 390.25-0ubuntu0~gpu17.10.1 amd64 Tool for configuring the NVIDIA graphics driver (I see I have a residual 390 driver there, doesn't seem to create issues at moment)
cat /proc/cmdline
BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-4.13.0-19-generic root=UUID=30a2f3e4-58f1-49b0-91d8-1437d69d97f9 ro recovery nouveau.modeset=0 acpi_rev_override=1
(I have to pass via 4.13.0.9-generic Recovery mode though, edit cmdline with above, run fsck, resume boot)
I seem to have the nouveau driver still loaded
lsmod | grep nouveau
nouveau 1638400 0 mxm_wmi 16384 1 nouveau ttm 94208 1 nouveau
i2c_algo_bit 16384 2 nouveau,i915
drm_kms_helper 167936 3 nouveau,i915,nvidia_drm drm 356352 13 nouveau,i915,ttm,nvidia_drm,drm_kms_helper wmi 24576 4 dell_wmi,wmi_bmof,mxm_wmi,nouveau video 40960 4 dell_wmi,dell_laptop,nouveau,i915
Using gdm3 (3.26.1-3ubuntu3)
in /etc/gdm3/custom.conf
#WaylandEnable=false
dpkg -l | grep "4.13.0-19"
ii linux-headers-4.13.0-19 4.13.0-19.22 all Header files related to Linux kernel version 4.13.0
ii linux-headers-4.13.0-19-generic 4.13.0-19.22 amd64 Linux kernel headers for version 4.13.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP
ii linux-image-4.13.0-19-generic 4.13.0-19.22 amd64 Linux kernel image for version 4.13.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP
ii linux-image-extra-4.13.0-19-generic 4.13.0-19.22 amd64 Linux kernel extra modules for version 4.13.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP
this combination boots, recognises a connection of external monitor (plug in and out hdmi cable after boot is ok). I noticed if I insist on Mirror mode the Gnome settings drivers crashed once.
suspend/resume ok (Alt-power-down to suspend) (I manually suspend, I don't close the lid, fear of it not suspending and overheating)
power consumption seems a bit high still (fan running low often)
Anyway, good luck to all 9560 owners out there.....
if anyone out there has other combinations working .....
