External monitor setup

General system Newbie
1

I would like to use an external 4K monitor with my Thinkpad X1 extreme laptop with Intel 630 graphics and a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti card. There is no display on the external monitor when connected, probably because the HDMI output runs off the Nvidia card (?).

I followed the link from the Wiki article (https://endeavouros.com/docs/hardware-and-network/nvidia-installer/) and the Nvidia site indicated the Version 441 driver. I messed up the previous installation of Endeavour OS after activating the Nvidia driver led to a black screen, and I could not recover even after uninstalling the proprietary driver and using the Nouveau driver. I would like to use both screens if possible, but atleast the 27" 4K monitor alone if necessary. I have been following the discussions on this forum and I saw some suggestions to run ‘sudo nvidia-installer -b’ and one to install the Nvidia driver and optimus. I only have nvidia-installer-dkms installed on my system. Should I install nvidia-installer separately? The relevant output from xrandr is
Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 3840 x 2160, maximum 32767 x 32767
eDP1 connected primary 3840x2160+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 340mm x 190mm
3840x2160 60.00*+ 59.97
…
VIRTUAL1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
eDP-1-2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-1-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP-1-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP-1-2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

Thanks.

2

Hello @recif
You should be able to run a test first to see if the install will work. Check the output of the following. You should be using the 440 series driver

sudo nvidia-installer-dkms -b -t

The -t is for test so if there are no errors you should be able to install it without using the -t.

3

The testing mode (-t) should be run without sudo… But it will complain about sudo.

1 Like
4

Using sudo gave ‘Do not run this installer in test mode with administrative privileges’
I then ran ‘nvidia-installer-dkms -b -t’ and it completed with:

Installation finished. Nothing has been modified as testing mode was ON.

At this point should I reboot, and how do I get the system to detect the external monitor? Thanks.

5

This is only a test and if it completed without any problems then you could go ahead and install it.

sudo nvidia-installer-dkms -b

6

I ran ‘sudo nvidia-installer-dkms -b’, then ’ sudo systemctl reboot
On reboot I could not locate the external monitor using xrandr.
'nvidia-settings ’ gives an error:

ERROR: NVIDIA driver is not loaded

‘optirun glxgears’ runs fine. I am not sure what I should do to load the nvidia driver and have the external monitor detected.

7

Have you looked at the Xfce info here? I’m assuming you have Xfce desktop?

https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-settings/display