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My graphics card is a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. I am unable to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers through the "Software and Updates" program.

When I try installing it through the command line (sudo apt install nvidia-driver-440 or sudo ubuntu-drivers autoupdate) I get the following message telling me of dependencies that "are not going to be installed." Below is that message:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 nvidia-driver-440 : Depends: nvidia-dkms-440 (= 440.48.02-0ubuntu0~~18.04.1) but it is not going to be installed
                     Recommends: libnvidia-decode-440:i386 (= 440.48.02-0ubuntu0~~18.04.1)
                     Recommends: libnvidia-encode-440:i386 (= 440.48.02-0ubuntu0~~18.04.1)
                     Recommends: libnvidia-ifr1-440:i386 (= 440.48.02-0ubuntu0~~18.04.1)
                     Recommends: libnvidia-fbc1-440:i386 (= 440.48.02-0ubuntu0~~18.04.1)
                     Recommends: libnvidia-gl-440:i386 (= 440.48.02-0ubuntu0~~18.04.1)
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

I have tried fixing the broken package (sudo apt install -f nvidia-dkms-440), but that package has it's own dependency that "is not going to be installed":

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 nvidia-dkms-440 : Depends: dkms but it is not going to be installed

That's when I went back to the dependency in the first message and read it more closely:

Depends: nvidia-dkms-440 (= 440.48.02-0ubuntu0~~18.04.1) but it is not going to be installed

Does this mean that the dependency will only work with Ubuntu 18.04.1? I have Ubuntu 18.04.3. Do I have to reinstall Ubuntu to a slightly previous version to get these dependencies to work or is there something else I should try? Thanks!

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  • It works for me on 18.04.3. Something is wrong with your system.
    – Pilot6
    Feb 1, 2020 at 19:49
  • You can try to first remove all nvidia packages and only then install what is necessary for You. Feb 1, 2020 at 20:14

1 Answer 1

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Problem solved! Got the driver installed.

So it turns out the dependency to the driver (nvidia-dkms-440) had a dependency (dkms) which had a dependency (dpkg-dev) which had a dependency (libdpkg-perl) which was in fact installed on my computer.

The problem was that I had the latest version of that package (1.19.0.5ubuntu2.1) and for some reason that was preventing me from installing dpkg-dev. I simply downgraded to 1.19.0.5ubuntu2 and was able to install this chain of dependencies so I can finally play Minecraft.

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  • How did you diagnose this problem? Did you use 'aptitude', to identify potential solutions? The answer was a library four libraries deep. Any best practices that would extend to identifying these deep chain dependencies? Apr 16, 2020 at 5:12
  • I didn't use aptitude for this problem, but I have use it for subsequent problems where a package had a large amount of dependencies with a similar "unable to correct problem" problem. Basically reject the first suggestion aptitude gives, and the next suggestion will be to downgrade packages. Then everything will work. I still don't understand why this is happening on my system, though. According to synaptic I don't have any held broken packages, and nothing else I do will fix the problem - except for downgrading the dependencies, which is weird as well because why would that be a problem? Apr 17, 2020 at 8:20

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