Problem installing Nvidia driver on Ubuntu 20.04

Solution 1:

After researching in several forums, I found a partial solution here by the user alok.fj

The steps are quite simple, I put all the steps here in order:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade
$ sudo apt autoremove
$ sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia*
$ sudo apt-get remove --purge "nvidia*"

Then I run (as the original idea was)

$ ubuntu-drivers devices

WARNING:root:_pkg_get_support nvidia-driver-390: package has invalid Support Legacyheader, cannot determine support level
modalias : pci:v000010DEd00001C8Csv00001028sd00000798bc03sc00i00
vendor   : NVIDIA Corporation
model    : GP107M [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Mobile]
driver   : nvidia-driver-460 - distro non-free
driver   : nvidia-driver-418-server - distro non-free
driver   : nvidia-driver-470 - distro non-free recommended
driver   : nvidia-driver-450-server - distro non-free
driver   : nvidia-driver-460-server - distro non-free
driver   : nvidia-driver-390 - distro non-free
driver   : xserver-xorg-video-nouveau - distro free builtin

Note that I still get the WARNING, but instead of running sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall, run the command explicitly clarifying the desired driver version:

sudo apt install nvidia-driver-470
sudo reboot

Once you have rebooted, test the installation with nvidia-smi and you should get something like this:

$ nvidia-smi

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 470.57.02    Driver Version: 470.57.02    CUDA Version: 11.4     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                               |                      |               MIG M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce ...  Off  | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| N/A   50C    P0    N/A /  N/A |    447MiB /  4040MiB |      1%      Default |
|                               |                      |                  N/A |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
...

TL; DR

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade
$ sudo apt autoremove
$ sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia*
$ sudo apt-get remove --purge "nvidia*"
$ sudo apt install nvidia-driver-470      (you may need other version)
$ sudo reboot

Test with

$ nvidia-smi