Unable to switch to NVidia-375 on Ubuntu 16.04

Question

I have an ASUS laptop with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M and a Skylake processor with integrated graphics running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Observations:

1. when I run lspci from the terminal (not with sudo), I get:

   ~$ lspci | grep VGA
   
   00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Skylake
   Integrated Graphics (rev 06)
   

2. I have already switched the graphics after brand new installation of Ubuntu as follows:

   

3. I faced problem of freezing screen while installation so I did nouveau.modeset = 0 while booting and once booted I edited the grub file as per this solution i.e.

   GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nouveau.modeset=0". Then update-grub.
   

4. On executing nividia-settings on terminal I get this key missing problem which I don't understand .

   

Am I missing something very obvious? How do I switch to nvidia.

Answer 1

I recently had a similar issue after updating Ubuntu version to 17.10 and trying to set up NVIDIA drivers.

Symptoms were:

• Indication of NVIDIA driver selected in additional drivers GUI window, but lack of nvidia-smi
• Empty NVIDIA X Server Settings window (like on your screenshot)

Here's what I did:

• Attempted to switch a driver from terminal: sudo apt install nvidia-375 (375 is not really critical, can be any other reasonable revision)
• Carefully read the output of the command, noticed lines: Module build for kernel 4.13.0-16-lowlatency was skipped since the kernel headers for this kernel does not seem to be installed.
• Installed missing headers sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)
• Tried to install driver from terminal again (maybe rebooted prior to that and after headers installation)

Maybe in your case the reason is different, but I would still suggest same overall approach:

• try running the failing command in terminal rather that from GUI (with maximum verbosity level if possible)
• carefully observe the output
• in case of any errors/warnings - make a research and try to fix them