Display Driver Issue

Development Discussion
#1

Hello

I'm facing an issue with my display driver on Ubuntu Mate and could use some guidance to resolve it. Upon booting up, I got an error message related to the display driver, and it's preventing me from accessing the desktop environment.

The error message : Display driver not found. Please check your system configuration and ensure that the appropriate drivers are installed.

I've tried troubleshooting by updating the drivers and checking for any conflicts, but so far, I haven't been successful in resolving the issue. Checked Development Discussion - Ubuntu MATE Communitymulesoft
Can anyone provide some insights or suggestions on how to troubleshoot and fix display driver issues on Ubuntu Mate?

Thank you for your help!

Best regards,
stevediaz

#2

details help ... desktop, laptop, specs, gpu, ubuntu mate release.

3 Likes
#3

Hello,

I'd try to boot from UM live CD/USB first. If successful, I'd try to find out which display driver works in the live session and reinstall it.

The next (of first?) troubleshooting option could be loading UM from HD using 'Safe VGA graphics' (or similar) in grub menu.

Good luck!

1 Like
#4

I agree, nobody can't help without hardware specifications.

#5

Hi Steve,

Until you provide some specs on your gear, the following tips may of some help:

To troubleshoot:
You probably should uninstall all your displaydrivers first, because displaydrivers are already build in into the kernel.

For instance: nVidia, AMD and Intel GPU's work out of the box.
If it doesn't, you probably have a totally different issue than the drivers itself.

Updating the kernel while having installed a 3rd party videodriver directly from the vendor can potentially result in a non-working display because the old driver is not compatible with the new kernel and therefore must be either updated or recompiled.

3rd party drivers from the repository will recompile automatically after a kernelupdate, but even then: it can happen that the system updates to a new kernel while the (probably closed source) 3rd party driver is not updated yet, in which case your display won't work until that is fixed.

Besides the fact that the build-in drivers are often of higher quality and compatibility and hassle-free , you might have reasons to install 3rd party drivers.

So when should you install drivers then ?

  1. If you have installed an AMD card and you really need OpenCL

  2. If you are stuck with an nVidia GPU and either:

  • you need CUDA
  • you want to do some heavy gaming and need high speed performance

So you can either:

  1. keep the driver that worked and roll back to the previous kernel

or

  1. uninstall all displaydrivers and use the build-in kerneldrivers

or

  1. wait until the 3rd party videodriver gets updated.

So what to do in the future when using a 3rd party driver ?
Lock your kernelversion until you are sure that the 3rd party driver is also updated.

I hope this helps a bit, please let us know how you fare. :slight_smile:

1 Like