After a fresh Linux Mint 18.2 install, I installed the nvidia driver 384 provided by the official Ubuntu repositories. Booting leads to a black screen at login. The system is responsive to Ctrl+Alt+F1, I can login to command line. Uninstalling package nvidia-384 solves the issue, but leaves the machine with the open source Nouveau drivers.
The machine is an Asus UX550VD laptop shipping a GTX 1050M GPU and Optimus technology, i7 Skylake processor. Linux Mint 18.2 comes with kernel 4.8. Switching to 4.13 does not solve the issue. Booting with “nomodeset” does not solve the issue.
Your system looks fine now. It’s just missing the last step, enabling the output. With prime, this has to be done by the display manager using the commands
Please check if the package nvidia-prime is installed, if not, install it, reboot.
If it is installed and you’re using mdm to log in, add the commands to
/etc/X11/mdm/Init/Default
For other DMs, see this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA_Optimus#Display_Managers
Unrelated sidenote:
When you’re looking at the dmesg output you’ll still notice pcie errors originating from the sdcard reader. That’s a crappy Alcor device not having a working linux driver. Just forget about that, see if you can disable it in bios so at least you won’t see the errors.
Thank you for your reply. I installed nvidia-prime and it seems to correctly login now (didn’t yet tried to make Optimus work). I didn’t include the two commands you wrote - are they still necessary?
No, if you have video now, the commands have already been added by the nvidia-prime package. Optimus is now working, you can switch gpus by issueing
prime-select intel/nvidia
and reboot or logout/in.