Fixing Ubuntu 17.10 black screen with Intel drivers

Source: Pixabay

A couple of months ago I tried to update my laptop's Ubuntu from 17.10 to 18.04. It went horribly wrong and I needed to go back to Ubuntu 17.10. The problem was that my laptop booted normally, but when the display manager was supposed so show up, it was just black. I even couldn't reach the other terminals pressing Ctrl-Alt-F1 (or any function key up to F6). Needless to say, this sucked. Since I was quite busy with other things, I couldn't investigate this problem and just had to stick with Ubuntu 17.10. That worked fine for a while, but at one point the next problem happened: my laptop uses Nvidia Optimus, but for some reason it only worked with the discreet Nvidia GPU, not with the Intel GPU (I had the same problem mentioned before). After some trying I figured out that the Intel GPU only works with the kernel version 4.13.0-21, any newer kernel doesn't work. I thought it might be an Ubuntu specific problem and installed even the latest mainline kernel, but still no success.

So for a while I was stuck with kernel 4.13.0-21, for when I didn't want to use my Nvidia GPU (which is actually most of the time since it does drain a lot of battery). Now that I had some time left to do this, I figured out that adding acpi=off to my grub commands, allows the system to boot normally, the problem that remains is that this particular command should only be used as last resort, when nothing else works, since it e.g. turns off a lot of functionality like the fan control, adjusting brightness or volume using Fn keys or turning off the laptop after shutting down. After some digging I found the solution here

So if your computer doesn't boot using the Intel drivers you need to do the following steps:

• edit /etc/default/grub and add the following commands to the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT: acpi_osi=! i915.modeset=1 nomodeset. In my case this line now reads GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="acpi_osi=! i915.modeset=1 nomodeset quiet splash".
• update the grub configuration by typing: sudo update-grub into a terminal

Now everything works fine and I can use prime-select to switch between the Intel or Nvidia GPUs. Using PRIME is nice, but personally I prefer using Bumblebee since it allows to turn on the Nvidia GPU without the need of logging in and out. My next step is to upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 and getting Bumblebee to work there.