Apps unable to connect to the internet after beginning of NVIDIA driver install process

Question

I'm fairly new to linux and like the title says I was trying to install a NVIDIA driver on Ubuntu 22.04 and during this process something went wrong and now the apps on my computer (browser, VPN,etc.) are unable to connect to the internet. My computer shows as me being connected to my home wifi but none of my apps are able to make a connection.

The steps I took that put me into this situation were as follows:

1. I kept getting an error when trying to install the driver telling me that I needed to stop my X server in order to install them.
2. I looked up how to do this and saw that I had to switch to a tty and stop the X server there.
3. The command I found said to press Ctrl + Alt + F1 to get to the tty.(I believe this was my first mistake).
4. Once logged in to the tty I then ran the sudo service gdm stop command in the terminal which successfully stopped my X server and caused my screen to go black with only a horizontal white blinking line showing on the screen.
5. After a while I thought nothing was happening so I pressed Ctrl + Alt + Del which proceeded to restart my computer

It was after this initial restart I found that none of my apps were able to make a connection to the internet even though I was connected to my home wifi network. I realize that I may not have been in a tty to begin with as I was still seeing my desktop after the Ctrl + Alt + F1 command and stopping my X server while not in a tty and then restarting my computer abruptly may have messed something up with my config.

I've tried a lot of things in hopes to resolve this but I found that nothing was working. I tried restarting gdm, the NetworkManager and various other service in hopes that doing that would fix the issue but nothing has worked so far.

Like I said before I am fairly new to Linux so if there are any more suggestions or things I may have missed during my initial troubleshoot please let me know.

Thanks in advance for the help!

Answer 1

TLDR; Had to manually disconnect ProtonVPN with a protonvpn-cli disconnect command. After this I was able to successfully install the NVIDIA driver with sudo apt install nvidia-driver-535 -> sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -> sudo reboot.

More Details:

To anyone experiencing the same difficulties here is the solution I took to resolve the issue for my specific GPU (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060) and Ubuntu version (22.04).

After ubfan1 helped me confirm that it was not in fact an internet connection issue I started to move away from searching for problems related to the NVIDIA driver install and instead started looking for ways to fix the inability of my apps (VPN, browser, etc.) to connect to the internet. The reason I did this is because I tried purging all of my nvidia related drivers and it came back that there were none to uninstall.

My search led me to this post: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/378387/can-ping-8-8-8-8-but-cant-browse-internet

At the very bottom of that post there is one comment in regards to ProtonVPN which is the VPN I use. I thought this was worth a shot over the other solutions because I knew my internet connection was fine and I believed that nothing I did altered my DNS routing settings so I typed the protonvpn-cli disconnect command and lo' and behold my apps could now connect to the internet!

What I took from this is that if you are experiencing a problem similar to mine the first place I would look is to see if you have an app installed that affects your internet traffic. In my case it was my VPN but it could be something like a firewall as well.

After fixing this issue I checked to see what driver I needed to install which appeared after typing the command ubuntu-drivers devices. From this list there should be a recommended driver indicating the one you should install. For me it was 535 but this will vary depending on your GPU. I typed sudo apt install nvidia-driver-535 and then sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade. The last commands are important because for me if I didn't do this then the next time I booted up I couldn't connect to the internet at all.

Finally once I was fully updated and upgraded I did a sudo reboot and voila I had my drivers installed which I confirmed with a nvidia-smi command and I could connect to the internet.