[SOLVED] Multiple monitors issue / GNOME 3 / NVIDIA

Icefyre · 2018-02-06 11:36:25

Hello everybody,

first off, I'd like to say hello.
All the years I used Arch and it's user contributed articles without contributing myself, so thank you for all your help!
I'll try to use my very little knowledge to contribute in future, but for now I'm in need of your help once again.

I'm running Arch Linux on a Lenovo ThinkPad P70. Everything run nice and smoothly for months now - till yesterday, when I installed Steam and, by that, apparently installed the wrong driver group for my GPU by mistake. I didn't realize until I started my laptop this morning, where nothing worked anymore. It took me some time, not only to find the source of the problem, but especially to fix it, as the TTY where my GDM service was running popped all the time I wanted to use another TTY (WTF...).

After some rough keyboard hacking, I finally managed to run the essential command to install the nvidia-utils driver. I can run my beloved GNOME again and it seems to work nicely again. However, my external monitors aren't working anymore. I tried to configure everything as in the NVIDIA wiki, but I'm not even able to run the first commands. Unfortunately, I totally suck at graphic stuff in general and have no clue about how to configure this. I was happy when I installed GNOME 3 moths ago and everything worked out of the box, but now I'm totally lost.

TL;DR: I can't get my external monitors running again after being forced to reinstalling my GPU driver, and I'm a total noob when it comes to stuff like this. I'm using GNOME 3 on an NVIDIA QUADRO M600M (family details at the end of this post), and this is what I tried so far:

$ nvidia-xconfig

Using X configuration file: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf".

WARNING: Unable to parse X.Org version string.


ERROR: Unable to write to directory '/etc/X11'.

$ sudo nvidia-xconfig

Using X configuration file: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf".
Backed up file '/etc/X11/xorg.conf' as '/etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup'
New X configuration file written to '/etc/X11/xorg.conf'

$ nvidia-settings

ERROR: Unable to find display on any available system

$ sudo nvidia-settings
No protocol specified
Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused

ERROR: The control display is undefined; please run `nvidia-settings --help` for usage information.

xorg.conf:

$ ls /etc/X11
xinit  xorg.conf  xorg.conf.d  xorg.conf.nvidia-xconfig-original  Xsession.d

$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf
# nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig
# nvidia-xconfig:  version 387.34  (buildmeister@swio-display-x64-rhel04-15)  Tue Nov 21 03:31:45 PST 2017


Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Layout0"
    Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "Files"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"

    # generated from default
    Identifier     "Mouse0"
    Driver         "mouse"
    Option         "Protocol" "auto"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/psaux"
    Option         "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
    Option         "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"

    # generated from default
    Identifier     "Keyboard0"
    Driver         "kbd"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "Unknown"
    HorizSync       28.0 - 33.0
    VertRefresh     43.0 - 72.0
    Option         "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Device0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

xrandr: (Am I guessing right that my monitors aren't even recognized at this point?)

$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 8192 x 8192
XWAYLAND0 connected 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 380mm x 210mm
   1920x1080     59.96*+

GPU details:

$ lspci -k | grep -A 2 -E "(VGA|3D)"
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 530 (rev 06)
	Subsystem: Lenovo HD Graphics 530
	Kernel driver in use: i915
--
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GM107GLM [Quadro M600M] (rev a2)
	Subsystem: Lenovo GM107GLM [Quadro M600M]
	Kernel driver in use: nvidia

As said several times before, I'm a total noob, and I'd be very thankful for any hints, suggestions or whatever will lead me to the right direction. ^^

Thanks in advance and many greetings from Cologne!

Last edited by Icefyre (2018-02-06 14:42:58)

Slithery · 2018-02-06 11:46:51

Welcome to the forums Icefyre

The most useful thing to look at would be your pacman log, it records what packages were installed/removed when you made the selection.

The commands you've already tried have probably just made thing worse, as nvidia-xconfig is well known to produce invalid output.
At the very least you should remove the generated xorg.conf before attemping to startx and posting a new log.

Icefyre · 2018-02-06 14:42:30

Hello Slithery,

thanks for the pacman.log hint. It was quite some scrolling, but eventually, I found out that I uninstalled and replaced the nvidia driver immediately after installing Arch, and why I did that. Reason was that I actually decided to use GNOME with Wayland and got already faced with NVIDIAs lack of Wayland support back then. I just forgot it over all the time and eventually got faced with a mixed up configuration... duh!

Replaced Wayland with X and reinstalled the messed up stuff, and I'm all good again. Thank you very much, your hint really lead to the right direction.

Last edited by Icefyre (2018-02-06 14:57:56)

Arch Linux

#1 2018-02-06 11:36:25

[SOLVED] Multiple monitors issue / GNOME 3 / NVIDIA

#2 2018-02-06 11:46:51

Re: [SOLVED] Multiple monitors issue / GNOME 3 / NVIDIA

#3 2018-02-06 14:42:30

Re: [SOLVED] Multiple monitors issue / GNOME 3 / NVIDIA

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