nvidia videocard
The last time I moved my workstation (hoek) I never got the dual screen mode back again. So here is a section about the video card and how i revived the dual screen again.
diagnose
Simply put : you can only get 1 monitor to work, removing one of the cables makes the other one work and vice versa. When you run xrandr, it displays only one output: the active one. The main problem is probably that the driver can only handle 1 output at a time.
hardware
I have two philips monitors and a nvidia card
- Philips 272S
- Philips Brilliance 272B
- NVIDIA Corporation GK208B [GeForce GT 710] (rev a1)
The video card can be listed with
Note that the video card has a VGA/HDMI and DVI port. The VGA port cannot get to the higher resolutions so, you need to connect one monitor to the DVI and one to the HDMI port of the external card.
The onboard card cannot do that, that's why i bought the nvidia card. !!
remove the drivers
Reinstalling the driver from nvidia solved the issue, but you need to remove the faulty drivers first.
apt-get remove --purge '^nvidia-.*'
apt-get remove --purge '^libnvidia-.*'
apt-get remove --purge '^cuda-.*'
blacklist nouveau
I recall i needed the nouveau drivers before, but now they are in the ways if you install the nvidia drivers.
You will get the message that lightdm cannot start, and the kern.log will say something like:
Jan 17 12:01:50 hoek kernel: [ 1746.565706] NVRM: The NVIDIA probe routine was not called for 1 device(s).
Jan 17 12:01:50 hoek kernel: [ 1746.566585] NVRM: This can occur when a driver such as:
Jan 17 12:01:50 hoek kernel: [ 1746.566585] NVRM: nouveau, rivafb, nvidiafb or rivatv
Jan 17 12:01:50 hoek kernel: [ 1746.566585] NVRM: was loaded and obtained ownership of the NVIDIA device(s).
Jan 17 12:01:50 hoek kernel: [ 1746.566587] NVRM: Try unloading the conflicting kernel module (and/or
Jan 17 12:01:50 hoek kernel: [ 1746.566587] NVRM: reconfigure your kernel without the conflicting
Jan 17 12:01:50 hoek kernel: [ 1746.566587] NVRM: driver(s)), then try loading the NVIDIA kernel module
Blacklisting will help, and you can do this by creating a file
With the contents :
Then reboot, this will do the trick, check with
install the nvidia drivers
Now download the latest nvidia driver for your distribution. Get the drivers from nvidia, not from linux sites.
I got the working one here.
Shut down the X11 server because it will tell you to do so halfway.
Now run the installer
Just pay attention to any problems, if not. You at least have two monitors after reboot.
xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 5120 x 1440, maximum 16384 x 16384
VGA-0 disconnected primary (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DVI-D-0 connected 2560x1440+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 597mm x 336mm
2560x1440 59.95*+
1920x1080 60.00
1680x1050 59.95
1440x900 74.98 59.89
1280x1024 75.02 60.02
1280x960 60.00
1280x720 60.00
1024x768 75.03 60.00
800x600 75.00 60.32
640x480 75.00 72.81 59.94
HDMI-0 connected 2560x1440+2560+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 597mm x 336mm
2560x1440 59.95*+
1920x1080 60.00 59.94 50.00 60.00 50.04
1680x1050 59.95
1440x900 59.89
1280x1440 59.91
1280x1024 75.02 60.02
1280x960 60.00
1280x720 60.00 59.94 50.00
1024x768 75.03 70.07 60.00
800x600 75.00 72.19 60.32 56.25
720x576 50.00
720x480 59.94
640x480 75.00 72.81 59.94 59.93
Also you can view some info with:
nvidia-smi
Tue Jan 17 14:00:26 2023
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 470.161.03 Driver Version: 470.161.03 CUDA Version: 11.4 |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M| Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap| Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA GeForce ... Off | 00000000:01:00.0 N/A | N/A |
| 50% 42C P8 N/A / N/A | 746MiB / 2001MiB | N/A Default |
| | | N/A |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=============================================================================|
| No running processes found |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+