Nvidia driver 410 listed by ppa and ubuntu-drivers but does not seem to be installable via apt

I have a GTX 660M and Ubuntu 18.04 64-bit.

According to the official website, the latest graphics driver for this card is version 410.66.

The graphics-drivers PPA says

Current long-lived branch release: `nvidia-410` (410.66)

I have nouveau drivers installed at the moment according to lsmod and, apt-get purge 'nvidia*' does nothing.

I have done add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers and apt-get update and a reboot.

Running ubuntu-drivers devices gives this output

== /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0 ==
modalias : pci:v000010DEd00000FD4sv00001028sd00000551bc03sc00i00
vendor   : NVIDIA Corporation
model    : GK107M [GeForce GTX 660M]
driver   : nvidia-304 - third-party free
driver   : nvidia-driver-390 - third-party free
driver   : nvidia-340 - distro non-free
driver   : nvidia-driver-396 - third-party free
driver   : nvidia-driver-410 - third-party free recommended
driver   : xserver-xorg-video-nouveau - distro free builtin

Note this line:

driver   : nvidia-driver-410 - third-party free recommended

It looks like everything is ready to go to install driver version 410, but autocompleting apt-get install nvidia- indicates the highest available version is nvidia-390, and trying apt-get install nvidia-410 directly fails.

Why does apt not list the version 410 that the PPA and ubuntu-drivers both say is there?

And if I can't apt-get install nvidia-410, how can I install this version?

Solution 1:

Before trying to manually install the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver version 410.6 I recommend that you try to install it again from the terminal with these commands instead.

sudo apt install nvidia-driver-410 # nvidia-driver-410 has been updated to nvidia-driver-430 in 18.04
sudo reboot

Please note that the correct name of the package that you need to install is nvidia-driver-410 (NVIDIA driver metapackage) not nvidia-410. Installing the NVIDIA driver metapackage will install the NVIDIA graphics driver and several of its required dependency packages.

Update: The nvidia-driver-410 package in the Ubuntu 18.04 repositories has been upgraded to nvidia-driver-430.

If sudo apt install nvidia-driver-410 && sudo reboot doesn't work, you can also download the NVIDIA 410.6 graphics driver from the official NVIDIA website and install it manually.

1. The official NVIDIA DRIVERS Linux x64 webpage -> Supported products tab shows that the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M GPU is compatible with the Linux x64 (AMD64/EM64T) Display Driver version 410.6. Click the green Download button on the NVIDIA DRIVERS Linux x64 webpage to download this driver (NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-410.66.run).

2. Open the terminal and change directories using cd to the directory containing the NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-410.66.run file that you downloaded.

3. Install NVIDIA Linux x64 Display Driver version 410.6.

    sudo chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-410.66.run  
    sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-410.66.run  
    sudo reboot  
   

Solution 2:

I was able to install by selecting the specific packages, like this:

sudo apt install nvidia-driver-410 libnvidia-gl-410 nvidia-utils-410 xserver-xorg-video-nvidia-410 libnvidia-cfg1-410 libnvidia-ifr1-410 libnvidia-decode-410 libnvidia-encode-410

Just like @karel said. I wanted to share the dependencies.