On the eastern side of Oxfordshire are the Cotswolds, a pleasant hill range with a curious etymology: the hills of the goddess Cuda (maybe, see footnote). Cuda is a powerful yet wrathful goddess, and to be in her good side it does feel like druidry. The first druidic test is getting software to work: the wild magic makes the rules of this test change continually. Therefore, I am writing a summary of what works as of Late 2023.
As promised, I will tell you about another Linux Horror Story: The Nvidia driver automatic update that breaks your machine. This is a recurrent problem that I have suffered so many times that I tend to disable all Nvidia updates just to avoid it. Unfortunately, I forgot to do so on my new laptop, so it happened once more.
It all started when I tried to connect my dual monitor to my laptop, as I have been doing for the last 8 months. But the SO did not recognize the monitor. After unplugging and plugging my monitor a few times and rebooting my machine several times, I started thinking that it may be a drivers-related problem, so I just executed the command nvidia-smi to check if the GPU drivers were working. A familiar error message confirmed my fears:
NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn’t communicate with the Nvidia driver.
Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running. If you are lucky enough, this is a consequence of the driver update and rebooting the machine will make it work again. Unfortunately, it was not my case, so I started the process of uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers. To do so, in an Ubuntu machine, you only need to use the following two commands.
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