Bsrgvty

So, for a bit of background: I'm using Ubuntu 18.04 on an HP laptop, which uses a dual GPU setup. Before, I have been using it with just the Nouveau driver, but recently I wanted to add in a second monitor so I switched to the proprietary Nvidia driver 390.77 (which was something of an odyssey in itself).

Now the issue is that while the secondary monitor (connected through HDMI) works fine, the primary built-in laptop screen does not. During the boot-sequence, everything is displayed as normal on the laptop screen, including the grub menu and the startup log.

But the moment the log reaches "Started User Manager for UID 120" (at which point presumably the graphics driver is started up), the laptop screen freezes there and all further output is displayed on the secondary monitor. The Ubuntu display settings only recognize a single display (the external monitor), as does nvidia-settings.

What might be noteworthy is that I'm dual-booting this system together with Windows 10, and under Windows this issue doesn't happen, both displays work just fine and like you'd expect over there.

Now, my personal suspicion is that it might have something to do with the dual GPUs, in that the Intel one usually outputs to the laptop screen and the Nvidia one to the HDMI port, but I'm not certain.

I have tried to use the Intel GPU instead, via sudo prime-select intel, but in that case the Nvidia driver didn't load at all, and I could only use the primary laptop screen while the external monitor wasn't recognized (i.e. similar to the behaviour under Nouveau). Additionally, this lead to a very low resolution that could only be circumvented by manually adding a new mode via xrandr.

As for some possibly relevant data, here's the output of lswh -C video:

 *-display 
 description: VGA compatible controller
 product: GP107M [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Mobile]
 vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
 physical id: 0
 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
 version: a1
 width: 64 bits
 clock: 33MHz
 capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
 configuration: driver=nvidia latency=0
 resources: irq:142 memory:b3000000-b3ffffff memory:a0000000-afffffff memory:b0000000-b1ffffff ioport:4000(size=128) memory:b4000000-b407ffff
*-display
 description: VGA compatible controller
 product: Intel Corporation
 vendor: Intel Corporation
 physical id: 2
 bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
 version: 04
 width: 64 bits
 clock: 33MHz
 capabilities: pciexpress msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
 configuration: driver=i915 latency=0
 resources: irq:141 memory:b2000000-b2ffffff memory:c0000000-cfffffff ioport:5000(size=64) memory:c0000-dffff

And here's xrandr. Noteworthy here is that the usual name of the laptop's display, eDP-1, is not even listed here:

Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 32767 x 32767
HDMI-0 connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 598mm x 336mm
 1920x1080 60.00*+ 59.94 50.00 50.00 
 1680x1050 59.95 
 1600x900 60.00 
 1440x900 59.89 
 1280x1024 60.02 
 1280x800 59.81 
 1280x720 60.00 59.94 50.00 
 1024x768 60.00 
 800x600 60.32 
 720x576 50.00 
 720x480 59.94 
 640x480 59.94 

Finally, here's xorg.conf:

# nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig
# nvidia-xconfig: version 390.77 (buildmeister@swio-display-x64-rhel04-14) Tue Jul 10 23:19:22 PDT 2018


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

Some similar thing happened to me. It turned out that it was caused by something in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Luckily, there was a default nvidia config file I could use.

This solved my problem:

cd /etc/X11
sudo rm xorg.conf
sudo cp xorg.conf.nvidia-xconfig-original xorg.conf
reboot

During my fixing attempts, I ended up launching Ubuntu from a USB stick via "try Ubuntu". As it turned out, in that environment both monitors worked perfectly without needing any further configuration. So I concluded the issue was not necessarily related to any hardware configuration, but rather to some error in my Ubuntu configuration. To that end, the solution turned out to boil down to simply reinstalling Ubuntu wholesale.

The particular steps I took, in case anybody somehow finds themselves in a similar situation:

1. Backed up my /home/ folder and any important data from the Ubuntu partition.


2. Booted from an Ubuntu USB drive, selected "Install Ubuntu", and chose "Erase Ubuntu 18.04 and reinstall".


3. After the installation, the first boot attempt failed due to the graphics hardware issue. I circumvented this by adding "nouveau.modeset=0" to the grub commandline default. This was only needed the one time to boot and was no longer necessary afterwards.


4. I installed the Nvidia 390.77 drive through Ubuntu's "Additional Drivers" UI.


5. Rebooted once again, and everything worked!

I still have no idea what might have caused the issue, but it shows once again that when in doubt, you might just want to try flattening your system and reinstalling.

Resetting the X11 config file (generated by default by the nvidia-config for 1 monitor only) fixed the same issue for me too:

sudo > /etc/X11/xorg.conf

reboot

Note: this is the same as the solution in the previous comment just because /etc/X11/xorg.conf.nvidia-xconfig-original is empty (zero) file in fact.