xrandr does not show HDMI at all

Question

I have a laptop (Asus N55SF) with NVIDIA GT555M GPU, with Elementary OS installed (based on Ubuntu). I have Bumblebee installed, with NVIDIA drivers, which works. (optirun glxspheres has higher fps than just glxspheres)

When I connect a display to the VGA adapter, everything works fine. However, when I try to connect a HDMI device, nothing happens. The HDMI port works on Windows 7 and 8, so hardware failure can't be it.

The weird thing is, when I run xrandr, I get the following output:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 8192 x 8192
LVDS1 connected 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 344mm x 194mm
   1920x1080      60.0*+   59.9  
   1680x1050      60.0     59.9  
   1600x1024      60.2  
   1400x1050      60.0  
   1280x1024      60.0  
   1440x900       59.9  
   1280x960       60.0  
   1360x768       59.8     60.0  
   1152x864       60.0  
   1024x768       60.0  
   800x600        60.3     56.2  
   640x480        59.9  
VGA1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

There is no HDMI device listed using xrandr! I searched the web, tried some other drivers, but I really have no clue what to do next.

Someone who might know what the problem is here?

Answer 1

Same was happening with me. I tried to update and downgrade nvidia drivers but couldn't solve the issue. The reason might be here that your nvidia driver cannot work properly because secure boot might be enabled in the bios settings.

I also checked the gpu properties by sudo lshw -C video and it showed *-display UNCLAIMED for my nvidia gpu.

Then I tried this and it worked for me-

1. Switch to nvidia gpu.
2. Power off the system and enter the bios settings. Find and disable 'secure boot' which I found in security settings in bios.
3. Reboot to linux.
4. Switch to nvidia gpu again just in case.

Now xrandr should show all the display output ports.

My gpu - GTX 1650. nvidia-driver version - 460

My laptop - Asus rog strix g(g351gt)

Answer 2

Recently I had run into the same problem when I upgraded my windows 10 to 11(running a dual boot with Kubuntu 20.04). That had changed the secure boot settings. I had to disable that and re-install the Nvidia drivers to get it working again.

Kubuntu 20.04 running on Acer Nitro 5.

Answer 3

Although this is an old question, the answer will help probably more people. That xrandr does not list your device often signifies a problem with the driver.

Use the hardware lister to check your hardware; sudo lshw -C video

You will find that if there is something wrong with the driver that there is a display, but that it is unclaimed:

*-display UNCLAIMED

The reason why your driver isn't working can be manifold. In my case I used a new (apparently yet unsupported) 4.1.0 kernel and the nvidia-346 driver was silently failing in the Ubuntu GUI. Reinstalling it on the command-line with apt-get showed that the compilation failed to insert the module in the kernel. Rolling back to 3.19.0 solved the problem.

PS: In your case you should've used optirun xrandr. HDMI will not be available if the NVIDIA graphical card is not in use.