I've set up KDE Neon on my friend's laptop. It's a Lenovo Ideapad 700 with an NVIDIA GTX 950M and an Intel HD Graphics 530. I've been having all kinds of trouble getting it to work.

First of all, after an update, the system would boot to a black screen. I fixed this by adding 'nouveau.modeset=0' to the kernel boot options.

After that I decided to install the NVIDIA drivers. I ran 'ubuntu-drivers autoinstall' and it pulled in the nvidia-384 driver. After a reboot, I was back to staring at a black screen. Adding 'nvidia.modeset=0' did NOT fix this problem. However, I've been able to work around the issue by adding 'systemd.unit=multi-user.target' to the kernel boot options and starting Xorg manually by typing 'startx' after logging in at console.

I then selected the proprietary driver in nvidia-settings, logged out and logged back in again.

At this point, I ran 'glxinfo' and was greeted with the following output:

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name of display: :0
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".
Error: couldn't find RGB GLX visual or fbconfig
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".

Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".

What am I missing? I thought that would have done the trick. Let me know if there's any other logs, output or information I should be posting here, too.

I've had the same issue with NVIDA graphic cards about 4 years ago. It doesn't work well with Neon. I even downloaded the NVIDA drivers (that is if you can get pass the login screen), and still didn't work. For that reason I went with Manjaro non-free version for a few years, but then got fed up with package breaking down after an update!. Finally I decided to build my own system, and have been running Neon on many computers, and laptops for many years without any problem (no NVIDA drivers though). How ever, Intel, AMD, ATI GPUs work well with this. I'm not sure if the new 18.04 platform will make any difference or not, but you can give it a try when it becomes available soon.

Hi,

try to use this repo:
https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers ... ubuntu/ppa

then you can use the most recent stable version (even through driver manager).

daret, I tried that PPA and although it let me install the latest nvidia-396 drivers, they give me the same problem. No GLX support at all. In fact, I can no longer open nvidia-settings in this version. I don't know what driver manager you're talking about, but if you're referring to 'kubuntu-driver-manager', that doesn't work. It just gets stuck on "collecting information" and does nothing useful. I was still able to install the new drivers using 'ubuntu-drivers autoinstall' after adding the PPA and running 'apt update' (and yes, I did try 'pkcon update' but that didn't seem to find anything new, I think it's ignoring the PPA).

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Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".

ERROR: Unable to load info from any available system

That's the terminal output from when I run nvidia-settings.

This is crazy. I helped my friend get this laptop just months before NVIDIA's downhill plummet. This was right before they stopped being the best (if not ONLY) viable choice for Linux users who wanted a discrete GPU. It's his first Linux machine and this is not making a good first impression on him at all. It was hard enough talking him out of running back to Windows once he started getting the black screen of nothing problem.

What am I supposed to do, tell him to just run the Intel drivers? I promised him he could play games on this laptop, now it won't even launch Steam without GLX support. I promised him he could do light amounts of video production and CAD-style architectural design on this laptop. I promised him he'd be getting his money's worth out of this hardware. It's a laptop, so I can't exactly just replace the GPU with an ATI equivalent, as much as I'd love to.

NVIDIA is making a fool out of me and it's making a terrible impression on Linux as a platform. 10 years ago it would have been easy to set him up with an NVIDIA GPU on Linux, which is completely insane because 10 years ago doing anything else in Linux was quite a bit harder than it is today. Now all I can think about is Linus Torvalds with his middle finger extended upwards at NVIDIA, and how much I agree with that statement now more than ever before.

Is there really nothing that can be done? Surely someone out there is running KDE Neon with an NVIDIA GPU. There has to be a way. My brain just can't comprehend that this is something that can't be done anymore. This used to be downright trivial on even the most technical and difficult to use distributions. I used to run the NVIDIA drivers in Gentoo, for crying out loud.

Could you please post the output of the following command? It maybe just trying to load the wrong module.

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cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep glx


I am having the same issue. Unfortunately, it was working for me and afterwards it stopped working with all the same above errors. Now with Nvidia-396 it does not load the kernel modules. However, i have noticed that in the display-manager log it says "Is Nvdia blacklisted? Yes"

I had all the above and now, I installed the Nvidia-390 after purging nvidia* and removing bubmelbee works fine now after weeks!
I hope it would work for you as well. For me it was driver comptability issue.
The Nvidia-48* and the same way you described it installed nvidia-396 but it did not work for me giving me all the errors you have mentioned, now it was fiex when i tried nvidia-390.
Using Lenovo integrated "Nvidia 840M", to summerize:
- Removed all Nvidia packages
- Removed Bubmbelbee
- Installed Nvidia-390

Why removing Bumbelbee, as an advice I took from Ubuntu support channel to try this in order to figureout why nvidia was blaklisted and the package did not compile the kernel modules, and it worked.

Gosh, sorry I took so long to get back. Big heat wave in my city, didn't wanna work until my head was more clear.

I thought of running nvidia-xconfig, but that didn't generate a xorg.conf capable of running GLX. Same issues, with an nvidia-xconfig generated xorg.conf, as well as without a xorg.conf. It also annoyingly set the resolution to 640x480. Nothing a bit of xrandr can't fix, but still...

jsalatas wrote:Could you please post the output of the following command? It maybe just trying to load the wrong module.

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cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep glx

Here's what it says:

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$ cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep glx

[   573.235] (II) "glx" will be loaded by default.
[   573.235] (II) LoadModule: "glx"
[   573.235] (II) Loading /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xorg/extra-modules/libglx.so
[   573.238] (II) Module glx: vendor="NVIDIA Corporation"

I'm puzzled... it looks fine, but it's still not behaving.

BaKKar wrote:I had all the above and now, I installed the Nvidia-390 after purging nvidia* and removing bubmelbee works fine now after weeks!
I hope it would work for you as well. For me it was driver comptability issue.

I've been wondering if a driver downgrade might be in order. This laptop is over a year old now, and it's also a Lenovo. Ideapad 700, to be precise.

Anyway, I'll give this a shot. I'll purge 'nvidia*' and 'bumblebee*', install the latest driver manually, then downgrade the drivers one version at a time until one works. I'll report back here once I'm done.

UPDATE: Urgh. I tried 'nvidia-396', 'nvidia-390', 'nvidia-384', 'nvidia-340' and 'nvidia-304' from the 'graphics-drivers' PPA, as well as the 'nvidia-384' and 'nvidia-340' packages from the default repositories. I skipped the versions that just provided a transitional package to a newer version. After every failure, I did an 'apt purge nvidia*' followed by a 'pkcon install nvidia-3XX'. I rebooted after every purge and install. The first three had the same issue as described in the original post. The last two wouldn't even let me 'startx' due to some issues with glamor, according to the Xorg.0.log. Here's an excerpt from when I was trying the 'nvidia-304' driver, I have no idea why it logged to '~/.local/share/xorg' in this version of the driver, but it did:

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$ cat ~/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log | grep glamor

[   178.228] (WW) "glamoregl" will not be loaded unless you've specified it to be loaded elsewhere.
[   178.234] (II) Loading sub module "glamoregl"
[   178.234] (II) LoadModule: "glamoregl"
[   178.234] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libglamoregl.so
[   178.237] (II) Module glamoregl: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
[   178.237] (II) glamor: OpenGL accelerated X.org driver based.
[   178.246] (II) glamor: EGL version 1.4 (DRI2):
[   178.273] (II) modeset(0): glamor initialized
[   178.300] (WW) glamor0: Failed to get GLSL version
[   178.300] (EE) modeset(0): Failed to initialize glamor at ScreenInit() time.

So that's that, I tried every driver available, to my knowledge.

It would be a real treat if I could not only get the NVIDIA drivers working, but also get them to work with Bumblebee rather than without it. This laptop eats batteries like nobody's business already, any power saving features I can take advantage of would be awesome. In any case, just getting the NVIDIA drivers working alone is my first priority. Installling Bumblebee doesn't fix anything so far, anyway. Strangely, though, it does make an icon appear in the tray that I hadn't seen before, warning me that the system is in software rendering.

I'm not sure if this will help, but I removed the 'graphics-drivers' PPA from before, then I reinstalled the 'nvidia-384' driver and uploaded the entire Xorg.0.log file to a pastebin, in case there's anything else in there that might point to what's going on. This is after reinstalling 'bumblebee-nvidia', hoping that it might help since I read that it fixes issues on some other distributions. It shouldn't make a difference in the log file, though, since I get the same GLX errors with or without Bumblebee installed. Here's the link: http://ix.io/19rs

In related news, my friend has said that he's never, ever going to buy another computer with an NVIDIA chipset again after what's been going on, even if I do get this working. Just wanted to put that here in case NVIDIA is looking themselves up on search engines.

Hi Ryblade,

your thread led me to take a look at my own GPU configuration (KDE neon 5.12.6) and it appears that on my Asus X751LJ-TY151T, the NVidia driver is not installed either. Surprise!

Well... not that much of a surprise actually, since I was already puzzled about the way KDE neon is built on top of Ubuntu LTS 16.04. For instance, I had faced this - not so critical - issue with Audio CDs (https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=309&t=151435) that I had managed to fix on my own (replicating the configuration coming from a default Kubuntu 16.04 installation). Other example: why isn't kubuntu-driver-manager installed by default (and therefore available by default in KDE's System Configuration) while being available by default on Kubuntu 16.04? It looks like Kubuntu team's efforts are simply disregarded and stupidly lost in the process of building KDE neon. I guess there is a (good?) reason for that, but still, what's working out of the box with Kubuntu isn't necessarily available on KDE neon, which was really a - bad - surprise to me when I tried KDE neon for the first time. Not sure I will continue using KDE neon in the future, for that exact reason.

'kubuntu-driver-manager' doesn't work. It just gets stuck on "collecting information"

This bug was finally fixed on Kubuntu 16.04 (running 16.04.4 on another of my machines).

I've set up KDE Neon on my friend's laptop. It's a Lenovo Ideapad 700 with an NVIDIA GTX 950M and an Intel HD Graphics 530. I've been having all kinds of trouble getting it to work.

Not a surprise to me, Lenovo is **** IMO. Their BIOS for instance lacks the ability to choose between BIOS and EFI modes (at least on some laptop models) which leads to a surprising warning message when installing Linux Mint 18.3. This is something I experienced myself, while installing this very distribution on someone else's laptop. I highly recommend following Mint's warning/suggestion (which I forgot the exact phrasing), it will save your time

Mentioning Mint 18.3 (which is based on Ubuntu 16.04 as well) is not aimless: I also have that distribution installed on my Asus laptop and my GeForce 920M GPU is handled perfectly well (meaning the NVidia driver could be installed graphically without any issues). Other advantage of Mint 18.3 over all other Ubuntu 16.04 derivatives I could test: my Android 6.0 smartphone is handled perfect well, while being practically unusable with other Ubuntu derivatives...

So despite of your hard work getting KDE neon to work on your friend's laptop, a good chance to reconcile himself with GNU/Linux and NVidia would be to give Linux Mint 18.3 a try IMO. Honestly.

Beware: the latest Mint version (19) is based on Ubuntu 18.04, which I didn't test yet. How does Ubuntu 18.04 behave with the NVidia driver and Android smartphones? I can't tell yet. To be tested maybe... But I can assure you that Mint 18.3 (still supported until 2021) will provide what you're looking for. On top of that, Mint has the best graphical package manager I could ever use in my GNU/Linux life. Much better than Discover for instance

Last point to keep in mind if you decide to go for Mint, and this is unfortunately bad news: Mint abandons the KDE desktop environment (DE) as of version 19 I can't tell why they took this decision, but this is the reason that led me to leave Mint, since my preferred DE is KDE and will remain KDE in the long term I believe. Cinnamon is not a bad DE, really not, but I was missing some KDE features, not to mention some Cinnamon limitations/bugs, that will hopefully get improved/fixed one day, but I didn't have enough patience to wait... You have other DE alternatives available with Mint 19 (MATE being the best pick IMO, compared to Xfce).

Now for a question to you, Ryblade: can you tell me more about what you wrote earlier?

[...] before NVIDIA's downhill plummet. This was right before they stopped being the best (if not ONLY) viable choice for Linux users who wanted a discrete GPU.
[...] Now all I can think about is Linus Torvalds with his middle finger extended upwards at NVIDIA, and how much I agree with that statement now more than ever before.

Thanks!

And good luck. I hope you won't give up, there are indeed solutions to get an Nvidia GPU to work with GNU/Linux, still nowadays.

Hey Valéry, sorry it took so long to respond.

I was actually using Mint on this system prior to trying Neon, but my friend wasn't as satisfied with it and we still had our share of NVIDIA driver problems on that distribution. I will try throwing some other distros at it and seeing what sticks, though. Considering the issues with packages critical to even detecting drivers being missing, I'm pretty much convinced Neon is a very ambitious tech demo at this point. I really hope that it becomes a proper distribution in its own right eventually. A stripped-down Ubuntu running Plasma is an excellent idea and I look forward to its completion and stabilization.

Right now I'm going to move on to Solus. The damn NVIDIA card has already been giving me guff on that, so I'm gonna go bug their forum members and see if they know what to do. Failing that, ElementaryOS will be my next attempt. I may actually try Ubuntu if that doesn't work either, despite my protestations to that idea overall.

As for what I was talking about with regards to NVIDIA, about 10 years ago this is exactly the same boat ATI/AMD users would have been in. I would know, because I was there back then trying to beat an ATI Rage Pro into cooperation with my bare fingertips. These days the roles have reversed. The GPU makers who used to support Linux the best now support Linux the least, and vice-versa. Also, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbovJbKALzA

Thanks again to everyone who tried to help. Sorry we couldn't get to the bottom of this.