26.04 beta installer is pretty broken with some NVIDIA hardware

Project Discussion Pre-Release Discussion
1

I’ve had to use safe graphics mode for as long as I can remember when installing Ubuntu from scratch on my 5950X/3080 system.

The beta is essentially uninstallable in it’s current form

Standard boot - black screen/display sleep

Safe graphics - hangs during boot at the point it tries to switch graphics mode (I think)

Even can’t boot the server edition to get a text login prompt

Tried passing numerous kernel args from grub…

Only way I could get this distro to reach the desktop was to repackage the ISO with Cubic to include the NVIDIA drivers, then it works perfectly!

2

It would be helpful if you posted the full computer specifications for your machine.

Also, which arguments did you use? Please post those too.

Thanks and welcome to Ubuntu Discourse :slight_smile:

3

Graphics hardware:

EVGA RTX 3080 XC3
Alienware 38” ultra wide 3840x1600 144Hz

Other:

ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero X570
AMD 5950X
64 GB (4x16) Trident Z Neo
Seagate Firecuda 530 2TB / Samsung 960 Pro 2TB

Tried various combinations of nomodeset, module blacklisting and nouveau options found online

4

If you use legacy boot, that is also broken in the installer. You can complete an install but the system fails to boot. It will get to the desktop once but reboot and grub can no longer find the partitions…

5

Tested again with latest daily build 20/04/26 and the problem still exists. This build appears to be a very near final release build as well (all the pre-release warnings in earlier builds has been removed), so it seems highly unlikely the final release will be any different.

However, it’s really easy to create a modified ISO using Cubic:

  1. Download the latest ISO
  2. Download/install Cubic
  3. Run Cubic, load the ISO
  4. At the terminal run the following commands:
mv /etc/apt/sources.list.d/cdrom.sources /etc/apt/sources.list.d/cdrom.sources.bak
mv /bin/uname /bin/uname.bak
cat << 'EOF' > /bin/uname
#!/bin/bash
if [[ "$*" == *"-r"* ]]; then
  echo "7.0.0-14-generic"
else
  /bin/uname.bak "$@"
fi
EOF
chmod +x /bin/uname
apt update
apt install --no-install-recommends nvidia-driver-595 nvidia-dkms-595 libnvidia-gl-595 libnvidia-egl-wayland1
echo -e "nvidia\nnvidia_modeset\nnvidia_uvm\nnvidia_drm" >> /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
update-initramfs -u -k 7.0.0-14-generic
apt clean
mv /bin/uname.bak /bin/uname
mv /etc/apt/sources.list.d/cdrom.sources.bak /etc/apt/sources.list.d/cdrom.sources
  1. Select default options for everything else and create the ISO
  2. Create bootable USB, reboot, select “Try/Install Ubuntu” as normal

Note: 7.0.0-14-generic should match the kernel on the downloaded ISO, if you run uname -r prior to temporarily replacing /bin/uname it shows the kernel of your local machine not the one on the ISO, hence why I’m replacing /bin/uname or driver install also fails.

6

26.04 is releasing so soon and yet it seems so far from ready

7

I’ve not found any issues so far with the latest daily, although I purely use it for development (various JetBrains IDEs, tools, etc)

8

Have been testing the beta release. No issues. Not that I am a programmer or power user, far from it in fact.

Am impressed so far that default Wayland just works with my older hardware and Intel graphics card and also, though this is not scientific, startup seems much faster than previous releases.

Obviously, there is still work to do…but kudos to the Canonical folks who are putting so much into this.

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