How to install Nvidia video drivers on Ubuntu 18.10?

This time we will be able to make available to newbies a simple guide so they can get and install the latest Nvidia drivers on their system.

The installation of these drivers is relatively simple if you understand the process and what to do step by step. Although many who are newcomers to Ubuntu or one of its derivative systems, want to install their drivers, they usually end up in a black screen or by reformatting the computer.

Before moving on to the installation process It is important to know that Linux offers free and open source alternatives for different video drivers and even generic drivers.

Whereby when we perform a "manual" installation we are implementing another additional driver to the system, so after restarting the system this conflicts since we have two controllers acting.

It is because of that we must block the use of a controller for the other to work. In this case, we must block the use of the free controller for the private controller to take effect.

Our Process

Already explained a little the above superficially, the first thing we are going to do is create a blacklist to block free drivers which in our case are the Nouveau controllers.
To create this blacklist, we are going to execute the following command:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf

And in it we are going to add the following.

blacklist nouveau
blacklist lbm-nouveau
options nouveau modeset=0
alias nouveau off
alias lbm-nouveau off

At the end we must save the changes with Ctrl + O and close nano with Ctrl + X.

Download

Now this process is done we are going to download the drivers that Nvidia offers us for our graphics card.

So that To find out which card model we have, we are going to open a terminal and execute the following command:

lspci | grep VGA

Once identified, you can go to the Nvidia website to download the latest stable driver released. Although recommended since not all of us have the same system configuration.

We are going to verify which version of the driver is compatible with our system, for this we are going to type the following command:

ubuntu-drivers devices

This command will take a while to output the information so do not despair.
With which something similar to this should appear, in my case:

vendor : NVIDIA Corporation
model : GK104 [GeForce GT 730]
driver : nvidia-390 - distro non-free
driver : nvidia-390 - distro non-free
driver : nvidia-390 - distro non-free recommended

And with that we will already look for the corresponding driver version. Note: it is important that you remember where you save what you just downloaded in a recommended way, leave it in your downloads folder. 

Now we are going to restart our computer so that the blacklist comes into effect.

Installation

Here you can still have the graphical server (graphical interface) in function, so you must stop it with the help of the following command:

sudo init 3

Or if you prefer with:

sudo service lightdm stop

o

sudo /etc/init.d/lightdm stop

GDM

sudo service gdm stop

o

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

MDM

sudo service mdm stop
sudo /etc/init.d/kdm stop

KDM

sudo service kdm stop

o

sudo /etc/init.d/mdm stop

In case you have a black screen at startup or if you stopped the graphical server now we are going to access a TTY by typing the following key configuration "Ctrl + Alt + F1".

Here you will access the system with your username and password and you must position yourself where you saved the downloaded driver.

And now is the time to perform the installation, for this we are going to give execution permissions with:

sudo chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux*.run

And we execute with:

sh NVIDIA-Linux-*.run

When the process ends you will have to restart your computer and you will be able to see your graphical environment working.

Installation from Ubuntu repositories

We can get a simple installation in two ways, the first is that the same system takes care of it, so in the terminal we execute:

sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

Now if we want to indicate a specific version found within the repositories We just type, taking as an example what the ubuntu-drivers devices command showed me:

sudo apt install nvidia-390