Ubuntu – Why does Ubuntu 14.04 not recognize NVIDIA GeForce 310M hardware

14.04graphicshardwarenvidia-prime

I've got a typical problem with my NVidia GPU. I recently installed Ubuntu 14.04 over windows 7 and completely whiped everything (on purpose), so I have a clean Ubuntu computer. Some specs:

  • ASUS KJ52c
  • RAM: 4 Gb
  • GPU: Hybrid NVidia 310M and Intel integrated Graphics
  • Processor: some Intel i5

On Ubuntu 13 I had the NVidia card up and running with bumblebee, and on Windows 7 it worked as a charm. Now, it's not recognized as hardware any more.

lspci | grep VGA shows:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 18)

lspci -v shows no hint of NVidia anywhere As such, I can't install any drivers for it, nor get bumblebee / nvidia prime running.

Any ideas would be very much appreciated.

Best Answer

First, the command you use for parsing video cards in this case:

lspci | grep VGA

Is not a reliable way to do this.

Reason is that for some video cards, they're not listed as a "[0300] VGA compatible controller", they could be a "[0380] Display controller", or a "[0302] 3D controller", a more reliable way to do this is:

lspci -nn | grep '\[03'

Secondly, if you could confirm the nVidia graphic card was not listed in lspci output, I would suggest you to check your dmesg output, to see whether it could be detected on boot.

Or check your BIOS setting, some system allow users to select what video controller they want.

If it's not detected at all, it could be a kernel issue (as you said it's working on 13.xx), please open a bug with "ubuntu-bug linux" in your terminal.

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