Hi,

I found a new laptop at a good price on taobao.

It has an NVIDIA GeForce 940MX GPU. Will this work OK with Ubuntu?

I know nvidia has some proprietary software.

I'd say so, reading this: https://certification.ubuntu.com/cat...nent/10de:134d.

1 members found this post helpful.

Q: What laptop architecture? 32-bit? 64-bit?

The nouveau driver may work fine for general purpose use. If you want to get more out of the Nvidia chip, you'll have to go to their web site and find a driver that handles that chip. Their web site has a somewhat simple way of finding the latest and greatest driver for chip "XYZ". Try starting with "Drivers->All Nvidia Drivers". The attached image is what you'll see once you select your GPU chip AND select "All operating systems". You'll need to specify whether you need the 32-bit or 64-bit version. I found drivers 390.87 and 440.31 for your chip. Verify which is correct for the laptop.

If you go this route, you're going to have to build the driver module yourself. It's not that scary but you'll need to have, at a minimum, the C compiler and the kernel sources installed. (No... you're not compiling the kernel---just the nvidia module. The graphics driver build needs the kernel header files.) You need to jump through a couple of hoops to keep the nouveau driver from installing at boot time (not too difficult). You only need to do that part once, though, and, if memory serves, the Nvidia build script did it for me. Obviously, the driver build and hoop jumping requires that you be working in the "root" account.

The downside of using Nvidia's proprietary driver (other than it "tainting" the kernel which bugs some Linux purists no end) is that, occasionally, a kernel upgrade will break the driver. The system will try to boot to graphical mode and never loads your desktop. If you're using Xorg for your graphical subsystem, the Xorg.log file will contain an error message about not finding a "Screen". (I'm not a Wayland user so I can't tell you what sort of error message you might see if the kernel and nvidia driver mismatch occurs.) At that point, you merely reboot into single user mode, re-compile the driver, and reboot. It takes maybe a minute to do this. TIP: Save the driver file in a place like "/usr/local/src/nvidia_driver" so it's easy to find when the rebuild is necessary.

If I were doing this on a new laptop -- and all the other parts of the laptop are compatible with Linux (probably the first thing you need to check out, BTW) -- I'd do a minimal graphical install but do include the C compiler and kernel sources. Then grab the Nvidia driver and try to get it to work. Once it works, install all the other packages you want/need.

If you do decide to use the Nvidia driver, post your progress/experience here. I'll try and help you out.

Good luck...

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Does it have only a 940MX, or does it also have an Intel GPU? Laptops with both are termed Optimus. Optimus means extra work getting and keeping video drivers working, using extra packages called Bumblebee or Prime.

There are actually two ostensibly competent FOSS DDX (X video driver) available for NVidia GPUs. The older technology, reverse-engineered DDX is provided for Ubuntu by a package named xserver-xorg-video-nouveau, which is optional. The newer technology, automatically used when supported by the GPU, and an optional DDX is not available, is named modesetting. I recommend using either of these FOSS DDX long enough to be familiar with their behavior before considering to complicate your updates by using the proprietary tainting drivers provided by NVidia.

Do not be confused by the term nouveau. There is a nouveau kernel driver that provides modesetting functionality, as well as the nouveau DDX, which depends on the functionality the kernel nouveau driver provides for competently functioning X.