After upgrading the NVIDIA driver to 440, Steam on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS failed to start.

steamclosed NVIDIA driversDistro Family: Ubuntu

ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#6789 · opened 2019-12-25 by leimao · updated 2019-12-26 · 5 comments · github

Lleimao 2019-12-25 github

Your system information

Steam client version (build number or date):
Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): 18.04 LST
Opted into Steam client beta?: No
Have you checked for system updates?: Yes

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

Describe what you expected should happen and what did happen. Please link any large code pastes as a Github Gist

After upgrading the NVIDIA driver to 440, Steam on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS failed to start.

Kkisak-valve maintainer 2019-12-25 github

Hello @leimao, does any 32 bit OpenGL application like glxinfo from mesa-utils:i386 work?

Please check if you have the libnvidia-gl-440:i386 package installed with something like apt policy libnvidia-gl-440:i386 and if it is missing, install it with sudo apt install libnvidia-gl-440:i386.

Lleimao 2019-12-25 github

Thanks @kisak-valve .
glxinfo does not work on my device.

$ glxinfo 
name of display: :1
libGL error: No matching fbConfigs or visuals found
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast
X Error of failed request:  GLXBadContext
  Major opcode of failed request:  151 (GLX)
  Minor opcode of failed request:  6 (X_GLXIsDirect)
  Serial number of failed request:  54
  Current serial number in output stream:  53

Installing was libnvidia-gl-440:i386 not successful neither.

$ sudo apt install libnvidia-gl-440:i386
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package libnvidia-gl-440:i386 is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
However the following packages replace it:
  libnvidia-common-440

E: Package 'libnvidia-gl-440:i386' has no installation candidate

Kkisak-valve maintainer 2019-12-26 github

So, your issue is with your video driver install not providing 32 bit userspace support, and is not an issue on Steam's side. Swrast is mesa's slower software renderer and the fact glxinfo is trying to use it tells us the system is trying to use mesa's libGL.so with the nVidia proprietary driver, which is incompatible.

Can you describe how you installed your current video driver?

https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa should provide everything needed for recent nVidia releases on your distro.

Lleimao 2019-12-26 github

Thanks. I used to install NVIDIA driver (together with CUDA) according to the instruction https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads?target_os=Linux&target_arch=x86_64&target_distro=Ubuntu&target_version=1804&target_type=debnetwork. It used to work well with Ubuntu Steam.

Kkisak-valve maintainer 2019-12-26 github

The issue you've encountered is being tracked at #5778 and is a video driver packaging issue. You should be able to lock in a preferred video driver version from the Proprietary GPU drivers PPA, then add in the individual cuda packages that you want to use without using the CUDA meta-packaging in a method similar to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/5778#issuecomment-517509736.

Closing in favor of the older issue report.

Upstream links

ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/5778x1 2019-12