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I am running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 64-bit on my HP Zbook which has a Nvidia Quadro graphics card. I am not able to detect multiple displays, whether I try to connect them through HDMI,VGA, or Thunderbolt 3 dock. It doesn't show up on display settings.

lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Skylake 
Integrated Graphics (rev 06)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GM107GLM [Quadro 
M1000M] (rev a2)

Now I obviously researched this problem as soon as I encountered it (my previous question that did not get any answers) and I have seen (and tried) multiple solutions such as those given at this forum answer and this forum answer. The problem is whenever I try to install nvidia drivers (which supposedly is the most common solution), such as those given on the first link, Ubuntu boots into a blank screen, or I keep looping through login screen after entering password (both of which apparently are known problems while messing with graphics drivers w.r.t. Ubuntu).

The only way I can log into Ubuntu again is by purging the nvidia drivers and reinstalling xserver (using the nouveau drivers as shown below). I have tried reinstalling nvidia drivers multiple times but goes into black screen every time.

enter image description here

Clearly I am either doing something wrong, like installing the incorrect version of nvidia drivers, or using the wrong non-proprietary drivers. If anyone has faced this problem before or has a solution to this, I welcome those suggestions.

Output of xrandr:

 xrandr
 xrandr: Failed to get size of gamma for output default
 Screen 0: minimum 1920 x 1080, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 1920 x 
 1080
 default connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 0mm x 0mm
 1920x1080     77.00*

Please post any diagnostic command requests and I will post those outputs in the edited question.

Thanks in advance

Rinzwind
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AVJ
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1 Answers1

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I did the following and hopefully it'll help others who stumble upon this problem:

The problem seems to have been a combination of the "hybrid graphics" in BIOS as suggested by @SunnyDaze in one of the comments (thanks for that). "Optimus" - as SunnyDaze suggested - is apparently the hybrid (Nvidia+On-board integrated graphics) approaches that switches between the two at run time automatically to get best battery and graphics performance link

I had to go into BIOS -> Advanced -> Built-in Device Options -> Graphics (options: hybrid, discrete, and auto). I selected discrete.

Thereafter I restarted but the displays were still not showing so I executed following commands

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa $ sudo apt update sudo apt install nvidia-396 (the latest one as given on Nvidia website).

After this I restarted and voila! All of my displays (2 monitors and laptop display) started working.

In summary, the nvidia-396 probably helped get the displays up and running, and disabling hybrid graphics probably avoided the blank screen after logon/logon loop problem mentioned in the question!

AVJ
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