External monitor stopped working

[Tahaan]

Hi All.

Last night I decided to try fix the sound through the built-in speakers on my laptop. This mission ended when my external monitor stopped working after a reboot.

I don't reboot often, generally only after updates, so it could have been something broken "lurking" in the background for a while. I did run `ubuntu-drivers list` and possibly `ubuntu-drivers autoinstall` during playing with the sound - I did not think that that would break my displays.

I have had the external monitor working for a couple of months but I'm not sure what made it work initiallly. I don't remember how I exactly got it working but I remember digging in power settings etc and at some point it started working on nvidia only. I decided never to switch to intel and not to touch those settings.

Since it broke last night I tried switching to lightdm (suggested on various forums) and played with prime-select and nvidia-settings. I've since switched back to sddm and uninstalled lightdm.

I've also tried re-running ububtu-drivers autoinstall, switching between nvidia and intel back and forward, rebooted multiple times, and removed the nvidia-drm setoption from modprobe as suggested on several web sites

Currently nvidia-settings shows a very "empty looking" window.



There used to be many more options to see.

What else may be helpful to solve my issue? I will post some outputs:

root@komp:~# lshw -c display
*-display                 
   description: VGA compatible controller
   product: GP106M [GeForce GTX 1060 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:161 memory:a3000000-a3ffffff memory:90000000-9fffffff memory:a0000000-a1ffffff ioport:4000(size=128) memory:a4000000-a407ffff
*-display
   description: VGA compatible controller
   product: Intel Corporation
   vendor: Intel Corporation
   physical id: 2
   bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
   version: 00
   width: 64 bits
   clock: 33MHz
   capabilities: pciexpress msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
   configuration: driver=i915 latency=0
   resources: irq:127 memory:a2000000-a2ffffff memory:80000000-8fffffff ioport:5000(size=64) memory:c0000-dffff

ubuntu-drivers devices
== /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0 ==
modalias : pci:v000010DEd00001C20sv00001462sd00001214bc03sc00i00
vendor   : NVIDIA Corporation
model    : GP106M [GeForce GTX 1060 Mobile]
driver   : nvidia-driver-410 - third-party free
driver   : nvidia-driver-430 - third-party free recommended
driver   : nvidia-driver-390 - third-party free
driver   : nvidia-driver-415 - third-party free
driver   : xserver-xorg-video-nouveau - distro free builtin

root@komp:~# modinfo nvidia
filename:       /lib/modules/5.0.0-25-generic/kernel/drivers/char/drm/nvidia.ko
alias:          char-major-195-*
version:        430.40
supported:      external
license:        NVIDIA
srcversion:     B9960A7E9AD113F15C3277E
alias:          pci:v000010DEd00000E00sv*sd*bc04sc80i00*
alias:          pci:v000010DEd*sv*sd*bc03sc02i00*
alias:          pci:v000010DEd*sv*sd*bc03sc00i00*
depends:        ipmi_msghandler
retpoline:      Y
name:           nvidia
vermagic:       5.0.0-25-generic SMP mod_unload 
signat:         PKCS#7
signer:         
sig_key:        
sig_hashalgo:   md4
parm:           NvSwitchRegDwords:NvSwitch regkey (charp)
parm:           NVreg_Mobile:int
parm:           NVreg_ResmanDebugLevel:int
parm:           NVreg_RmLogonRC:int
parm:           NVreg_ModifyDeviceFiles:int
parm:           NVreg_DeviceFileUID:int
parm:           NVreg_DeviceFileGID:int
parm:           NVreg_DeviceFileMode:int
parm:           NVreg_InitializeSystemMemoryAllocations:int
parm:           NVreg_UsePageAttributeTable:int
parm:           NVreg_MapRegistersEarly:int
parm:           NVreg_RegisterForACPIEvents:int
parm:           NVreg_EnablePCIeGen3:int
parm:           NVreg_EnableMSI:int
parm:           NVreg_TCEBypassMode:int
parm:           NVreg_EnableStreamMemOPs:int
parm:           NVreg_EnableBacklightHandler:int
parm:           NVreg_RestrictProfilingToAdminUsers:int
parm:           NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations:int
parm:           NVreg_DynamicPowerManagement:int
parm:           NVreg_EnableUserNUMAManagement:int
parm:           NVreg_MemoryPoolSize:int
parm:           NVreg_KMallocHeapMaxSize:int
parm:           NVreg_VMallocHeapMaxSize:int
parm:           NVreg_IgnoreMMIOCheck:int
parm:           NVreg_NvLinkDisable:int
parm:           NVreg_RegistryDwords:charp
parm:           NVreg_RegistryDwordsPerDevice:charp
parm:           NVreg_RmMsg:charp
parm:           NVreg_GpuBlacklist:charp
parm:           NVreg_TemporaryFilePath:charp
parm:           NVreg_AssignGpus:charp

root@komp:/lib/modprobe.d# ls -l
total 28
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  655 Nov 12  2018 aliases.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1487 Jun 27 09:04 blacklist_linux-hwe_4.18.0-25-generic.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1528 Aug  1 14:34 blacklist_linux-hwe_5.0.0-25-generic.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  390 Jul 22 18:45 fbdev-blacklist.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   81 Jul 31 08:15 nvidia-graphics-drivers.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  113 Aug 17 23:17 nvidia-kms.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  765 Jan 28  2018 systemd.conf
root@komp:/lib/modprobe.d# cat nvidia-kms.conf 
# This file was generated by nvidia-prime
# Set value to 0 to disable modesetting
# options nvidia-drm modeset=1
root@komp:/lib/modprobe.d# cat nvidia-graphics-drivers.conf
blacklist nouveau
blacklist lbm-nouveau
alias nouveau off
alias lbm-nouveau off

root@komp:/lib/modprobe.d#

Posts like this https://askubuntu.com/questions/1033...n-ubuntu-18-04 may have the answer but everybody has a different solution and I suspect it is the right combination of multiple solutions...

[Tahaan]

P.S Since I don't much need a GPU, ideal would be to get both monitors to work while using the integrated GPU. I've read that this may be possible on some computers, but sounds like it may be more hackish than I can justify.

[Tahaan]

Finally.

After trying many things the solution was to delete the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf and reboot.