Hello! That is my very first post on any forum so, first things first: I’m brazilian, my english is a little rusty, so feel free to correct me.
I have a Dell Inspiron 14 3443 laptop running with NVIDIA GeForce 820M graphics card and I installed Linux Mint 19 xfce on it. I tried really hard to install the NVIDIA’s driver, since it wasn’t appearing in the driver manager so I could install it. After a lot of work I finally got the 384.98 NVIDIA’s driver to work with the 4.13.0-21 kernel’s version running (if I upgrade the kernel to the 4.15.38-40, the driver no longer works). So now I wanted to install the CUDA Toolkit and there’s when the problem started: everytime that I try to install it, automatically is forcing my driver to update and when it does that the driver no longer works and I got a lot of issues like “the black screen problem”, the “unable to load ‘nvidia-drm’ kernel module” and I tried everything that I found on internet, for being more accurate, I tried several things that I saw here like https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1001312/error-unable-to-load-the-nvidia-drm-kernel-module-nvidia-driver-/ and in another websites like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42777533/unable-to-load-the-nvidia-drm-kernel-module. So I don’t know what to do now, I tried also install an older version of CUDA (the 9.1-85 version) but the problem is always the same: it’s forcing the driver to update. In the case of the CUDA Toolkit 10.0 it’s forcing to update to the 410.66 version, in the case of the 9.1-85 version it’s forcing to update to the 387.26 version. I don’t really know if I try to update the driver first and then I try to install the CUDA Toolkit, or I update the kernel to the 4.15.38-40 version first. I tried all those things and nothing worked. Please someone tell me what to do to get the CUDA Toolkit working, so I can use the gpu for Python’s Theano library.
Thank you for your attention and hope this topic helps more people in the same situation.