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gnomed
Asked: 2017-02-14 22:09:28 +0800 CST

Run Ubuntu on a 4K graphics card without a 4K monitor

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I have a funny problem. I recently upgraded my graphics card to one that supports 4K output (GTX 1080 from GTX 570), but my monitor can't handle 4K input yet (or more than 60hz apparently :/). My issue is now when I boot my system, my monitor just complains that the input resolution is too high and won't show me anything. It just tells me to change the resolution to 1920x1080@60hz. This also happens when booting from a USB startup drive as well, so I can't even do a clean install as a drastic solution.

I can remotely ssh into the machine when it boots, but xrandr won't let me do anything to the remote display through my ssh session. It gives me an error about an invalid Magic Cookie and I couldn't seem to get past that.

I can execute a few things by blindly typing on the machine and directing the output to a file that I then read remotely via ssh. From doing that xrandr seems to have limited options anyway. It's set to output 1080p apparently but I can't set the frequency and xrandr shows all the frequencies as 0.0.

I figured if it was just a driver issue then a clean install would work, but that gives me the same issues.

Just looking for some options besides buying a new 4K monitor right away. I actually won the graphics card and everything else about the tower I have is pretty solid despite its age.

drivers

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Well I managed to figure out my solution by using some logic and the curt suggestion from the comments on my question. I forgot that I was on an old version of Ubuntu and it wasn't getting the latest updates for drivers. Also, fun fact, nvidia-current package does not install the latest version of the nvidia drivers.

    Anyway my solution was first to do a dist upgrade. This made my monitor work, but I lost Unity completely and could not get it to work (nice reminder of why I never do dist upgrades).

    If I made a bootable drive of 16.10 I would get a monitor, and things would work, but it just wouldn't draw the mouse. I could click on stuff, it just wasn't showing me where my mouse was.

    16.04 out of the box did not work either. I ended up making a bootable 16.04 drive with the nvidia drivers manually installed. This was not as easy as it sounded. It was a pain to make a persistent bootable drive that would allow me to install drivers on it because they removed support for that from the usb-creator package that I normally use with Ubuntu to make startup disks.

    After a few failed attempts to use other tools (many complications caused by secure boot etc..), I ended up manually downgrading the usb-creator package and that worked fine.

    Booted the drive on a different machine (the same laptop I was using to make the drive in the first place) and installed the latest version of the nvidia drivers (NOT nvidia-current), and it was good to go for me to do a clean install with supported drivers.

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