Acer Nitro 5 video card issues

Question

I recently purchased the following computer Acer Nitro 5 AN515-53-762Q, Which gave me a lot of trouble when trying to install Ubuntu 16.04

I tracked the issue down to the video card (GeForce® GTX 1050) which was causing freezing and infinite loops at the login screen. After many attempts I finally have the computer recognising and using the video card. The last thing I did was:

sudo apt-get remove purge nvidia-*
sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

up to this point it still would freeze/loop at login, then I did

sudo apt-get install gdm
sudo service lightdm stop
sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm (then in the menu I selected gdm3)
sudo reboot now

and it works....sort of!

When I try to run graphical applications from the terminal I get the following error:

nicholishiell@HAL-2000:~/eclipse$ gedit

Failed to connect to Mir: Failed to connect to server socket: No such file or directory
Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused

(gedit:12219): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: 

Also why did switching to gdm3 make it work? And what is gdm3/lightdm?

Thanks!

Answer 1

This might be slightly off what your final question was, but I think it is pertinent to the situation. If you are struggling with NVidia drivers, this link has been super helpful for me.

http://www.terriblesysadmin.com/?p=38

Basically, these are the steps you need to do:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-* xserver* libcheese7
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-lts-xenial
sudo apt-get install nvidia-384 nvidia-settings nvidia-prime ubuntu-desktop
sudo reboot 

Notice that the driver is nvidia-384 instead of the older driver. Now, if you finish to this point, you should have a stable machine. BUT I highly recommend, if you plan on doing CUDA or other GPU heavy swag, that you install CUDA 10.1 from dpkg instead. Installing CUDA not only installed CUDA (shocker), but it also installs the video driver that is most up-to-date and compatible with your system, which I believe is 418. Basically, you need to boot to a recovery (root) prompt and then run the associated sudo dpkg -i theinstaller.deb. These are the local deb instructions:

sudo dpkg -i cuda-repo-ubuntu1604-10-1-local-10.1.168-418.67_1.0-1_amd64.deb
sudo apt-key add /var/cuda-repo-<version>/7fa2af80.pub
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cuda

From this link https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads. I recommend the local deb link because it has been the most stable, consistent solution. I can also navigate the the NVidia files this way: the run file does not work for me. I should also mention: the Acer Nitro 5, no matter what model (53, 55, you name it), will always kick the can when you install linux for the first time. You are not the only one struggling with this process. After installing the CUDA provided driver, I have not had any issues since with my Nitro 5.

One last thing: About the gdm3 and lightdm: those are GUI managers. They are services that you can start and stop. compiz is also a common GUI manager. I am not an expert in GUI managers, so I would recommend you search those 3 specific terms. For the Nvidia driver installation of this answer, I am %100 confident.

On a side note: it appears that installing the NVidia drivers also gets the cooling fans to work properly. When I am running an intense Keras neural network training script, the GPU cooling fans kick in. More reason to simply install CUDA...