External Monitor Went White on Ubuntu — Fixed by Switching from NVIDIA 535 to 555

[thingizkhan]

External Monitor Went White on Ubuntu — Fixed by Switching from NVIDIA 535 to 555

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Ubuntu Version
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) with the HWE kernel 6.8.0-40-generic (all packages fully up-to-date as of 5 June 2025).

Desktop Environment
GNOME 42 (standard Ubuntu session). I’m running Xorg after the fix; Wayland was also affected before the driver swap.

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Problem Description

The moment I plugged an external monitor into my laptop (HDMI), the monitor went completely white—only the mouse pointer was visible. The built-in laptop screen was fine.

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Relevant System Information

• Hybrid-graphics laptop (Intel + NVIDIA GPU)

• Original driver in use: nvidia-driver-535

• Secure Boot disabled

• Kernel logs spammed:

  NVIDIA probe routine was not called for 1 device
  

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Screenshots / Error Messages

• nvidia-smi output before the fix:

  NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver.
  

• dmesg flooded with the probe-routine message above (thousands of times).

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What I’ve Tried — and What Finally Worked

1. Completely purged every NVIDIA package:

   sudo apt-get purge 'nvidia*'
   sudo apt autoremove
   

2. Blacklisted the open-source nouveau driver and rebuilt initramfs:

   echo -e "blacklist nouveau\noptions nouveau modeset=0" | \
   sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf
   sudo update-initramfs -u
   

3. Added the official Graphics-Drivers PPA and let Ubuntu pick the best driver:

   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
   sudo apt update
   sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall   # installs nvidia-driver-555
   sudo reboot
   

4. After reboot, nvidia-smi works, the external monitor shows the normal desktop (no white screen), and the log spam is gone.

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Bottom line: the white-screen issue was caused by a broken NVIDIA 535 installation. Purging it and installing the fresh NVIDIA 555 driver from the PPA resolved the problem completely.