NVIDIA Driver with External Display on Left Fails

[NoWorries]

Since I reported problems with the NVIDIA Driver back in February there have been a number of multimedia updates as well as the NVIDIA driver now being the next version 361.28.

Previously the sound failed, now I have sound coming through the Built-in Audio Analogue Stereo instead of no sound from the Dummy Output. I still do not have sound from the display connected using HDMI.

I have a VGA and HDMI connection on my Laptop as well as two video cards. One Intel and the other a Geforce GT 630M. For both the VGA and and the HDMI connections, the external display on the Right side works. For the VGA connection, glxgears give about 4,000 fps while with the HDMI connection, glxgears gives about 60 fps. With no external display connected glxgears gives about 7,500 fps.

When I make the external display on the Left side, every thing fails. For the VGA connection, it does not show anything, ie black. When I use the HDMI connection, the external display screen shifts to the left as the cursor is moved to the primary display on the right, ie the primary display now shifts onto the external display.

One thing that I have to constantly repeat is to delete the directory kscreen to have a working system. Given the above problems, I suspect that the error is with KDE and not NVIDIA.

I am reluctant to reorganize my study to solve this problem, as being a left hander, the layout that I have is more suitable. So back to using the Intel card.

[vinnywright]

I will say ,,,,,,,,,,,yes , wonky things are happening if I try to move the display (HDMI on Nvidia) .

conky and the panel switch to the external display ,,,,,,, I still have sound however .

some freezes and slowness .

if I leave the external on the rite (where the system is putting it automatically when I plug in the HDMI cord),,,,all is well .

VINNY

[NoWorries]

Thanks for that reassurance Vinny.

I found it interesting that this morning there was an update to kscreen amongst a gazillion of other updates and it did not solve my problem. In fact, when using the HDMI connection with the NVIDIA card, I got the return of an old error with the hplip Status Service not being able to find a panel.

At least it is being worked on and I hope it is not too long before it is sorted out

[Teunis]

I just tried to swap the position of my external monitor to the left which seemed to work. (hdmi, intel + nVidia)

Until I found out the external screen now had the full extended desktop, when moving the mouse back to the right (laptop panel) it also showed up on the external monitor, the mouse would not show up on the laptop.

I haven't tried this after a reboot or log in again.

To add to your list of problems, this morning I saw some ~278 updates, one of them was the removal of Muon which I knew was coming anyway.
Upon reboot I was met by something new, no black screen but a white screen.

Running the apt dist-upgrade -f command in a virtual console (Ctrl+Alt+F4) suggested that plasma-workspace was missing, after installation I could log in again.
A still held up update is for Gwenview.

[NoWorries]

I also found that muon was removed with the updates. I also found that my calendar kontact would not launch. So I installed libmuon and then muon and decided to enable the Pre-released updates in muon. I found that after getting the extra updates from this step, I had KDE Plasma Version 5.5.4 installed and kontact now worked.

[life0riley]

I just posted about this here.

I had KDE Plasma Version 5.5.4 installed with the updates I took today.

I also found that muon was removed with the updates. I also found that my calendar kontact would not launch. So I installed libmuon and then muon and decided to enable the Pre-released updates in muon. I found that after getting the extra updates from this step, I had KDE Plasma Version 5.5.4 installed and kontact now worked.

I'm curious. Did you take all the updates after you enabled the Pre-released updates or did you just install enough to get Kontact working?

[Teunis]

An interesting observation that installation of libmuon enables installation of old muon.

Useless stuff like muon discover and muon notifier are removed.

I thought I had pre-released updates enabled but not so, next there were another 192 updates available.

Muon continues to report 4 available updates, when looking in the list of updates there are even 10 but the update fails.
Running apt in Konsole does update them, even after an update Muon remains ignorant.

[NoWorries]

I just posted about this here.

I had KDE Plasma Version 5.5.4 installed with the updates I took today.


I'm curious. Did you take all the updates after you enabled the Pre-released updates or did you just install enough to get Kontact working?

I have two systems with Xenial, one has the Pre-release enabled and one does not have it enabled. I found that after the updates on the system without Pre-release enabled, kontact failed while on the other system with pre-release, it worked.

I always make sure that all updates go through to conclusion. On the occasions where it fails I fix the installation on reboot.

[life0riley]

An interesting observation that installation of libmuon enables installation of old muon.

Useless stuff like muon discover and muon notifier are removed.

I thought I had pre-released updates enabled but not so, next there were another 192 updates available.

Muon continues to report 4 available updates, when looking in the list of updates there are even 10 but the update fails.
Running apt in Konsole does update them, even after an update Muon remains ignorant.

I just installed in the following order:
sudo apt-get install libmuon
-- then --
sudo apt-get install muon

Should I have the pre-released updates checked? I found it unchecked also.

There is no risk here. This is a VirtualBox guest, so its a great sandbox to play in.

[life0riley]

I have two systems with Xenial, one has the Pre-release enabled and one does not have it enabled. I found that after the updates on the system without Pre-release enabled, kontact failed while on the other system with pre-release, it worked.

I always make sure that all updates go through to conclusion. On the occasions where it fails I fix the installation on reboot.

I went ahead and took all the updates. It worked out fine. KMail and Muon are back and I'm happy. I'm posting from it.

[NoWorries]

Muon continues to report 4 available updates, when looking in the list of updates there are even 10 but the update fails.
Running apt in Konsole does update them, even after an update Muon remains ignorant.

I had a similar experience and the system did not complain after the older versions were installed. Currently my muon only reports that 2 are upgradeable which is the same as what I get from the command line

sudo apt update; sudo apt full-upgrade

[NoWorries]

There have been a few updates to the NVIDIA driver and I currently have nvidia-364 installed. Unfortunately it still does not work with an external monitor on the left.

With the previous update I was able to capture the display with it on the left. It looks roughly like this:



All other times that I have used spectacle, it gives the displays as they should be, that is, not the horizontally displaced image that is present. Currently, the image displacement only happens on the external monitor, the primary display is now as it should be.

If I start System Settings > Display and Monitor, no displays are shown - just a blank screen.



After this, the only option to close down is to use the power button. Full recovery from this situation is guaranteed by deleting the file ~/.local/share/kscreen. From my perspective it seems that code related to kscreen and System Settings needs investigating for the case of an external monitor on the Left.

On Thursday this week, the Release Candidate is due, and I would hope this is fixed soon.

[schnelle]

Multimonitor issues are qt 5.5 bugs and not kde/plasma5 bugs.

I was using Manjaro KDE for a few months, and when manjaro got qt 5.6 update, some users confirmed that it fixed their multimonitor issues. But, kubuntu will ship with qt 5.5 by default.

For me, on 16.04 with intel gpu, second vga monitor works well.

[NoWorries]

Yes, when I use the Intel display video card driver it works quite well with the VGA output and I have no problems using the external monitor with it. I only have problems when I switch to the NVIDIA option with the NVIDIA X Server Settings package. The NVIDIA driver is the only one which allows me to use the hdmi output rather than the VGA output.

Edit:

When I use the VGA output with the NVIDIA driver, it always boots up with the external monitor disabled. I then have to use System Settings to enable the external monitor which only works until I reboot and I then have to repeat the process.

[vinnywright]

There have been a few updates to the NVIDIA driver and I currently have nvidia-364 installed.

where did you get that from ,,,,,,,,@hear I still only see 361 ?

VINNY