[ISSUES] NVIDIA GTX 970 Install

BACKGROUND

Skip to ISSUES if you don't care

I am new to Linux and really want to give this a shot to get away from Microsoft and Windows 10. I've been trying to get this OS set up for 3 days now. After coming home to a dead SSD and a bunch of lost data, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to make the switch. So right now I'm computerless unless I can get this properly installed. At this point I'm losing hope as well as productivity and it's making be consider just going back to Windows.


ISSUES

I am able to install the OS and boot in fine if I set 'nomodeset'. Once I log in I attempt to install The GTX 970 driver and I've had nothing but problems.

The first time I got the driver installed fine it seemed, but upon rebooting I was unable to login anymore. My credentials didn't work and I got a message that a session could not be started. During the installation it said I had 2 boot managers installed and to pick one. GNOME was one of the options, I picked the other, after researching a bit about it.

The second time I followed different instructions in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2490 which did not work at all. Booting goes to black screen and using 'nomodeset' doesn't work either anymore, the computer hangs.

The third time I tried following: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php ... 649&page=2 the instructions are halfway down the page. I also tried similar instructions on another page. Same result. And many other tries.

Does anyone have any real instructions on how to install the driver? I would greatly appreciate it if someone could give me some guidance.


SYSTEM SPECS

EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
Intel i7 6700K Skylake
MSI Z170 Mortar

Hi, Sorry to hear of your woes - first can I establish that you are attempting to install Zorini 12.1 and not 12? 12.1 had a lot of fixes, just like Ubuntu 16.04.1 on which it is based. There have been some issues in respect of Skylake Processors and GNU/Linux (all flavours/all distros) and this is a hardware issue (i.e., Intel not making GNU/Linux friendly drivers). In respect of the graphics driver issues, a forum member, decalman, kindly shared a method of installing earlier versions of Zorin using the 'non-graphical' method to get the drivers installed - see his post here:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=8004&p=38810&hilit=text+based+install#p38744

I am going to make his post a 'Global' one at the top of the announcements.

Also check this thread, including links to resolution of driver issues on Ubuntu 16.04 on which Zorin is based:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/798448/ ... -04#798454

Here's hoping!