nvidia-440 installation issues need to be resolved and the package marked as 'tested'

The nvidia-graphics-drivers-340 is essential to many users. For example, on my MacPro 3,1 equipped with an EVGA GTX-680 Mac version graphic card, the nvidia 360, 390 and 396 drivers all fail due to issues with the new nvidia_drm module resulting in no video output on DVI and HDMI.

https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1042691/linux/black-screen-with-mac-version-of-gtx-680/1

Similiar issues exist for a number of PC users as well...

https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1037997/xid-61-black-screen-on-startup-ubuntu-18-04-gtx-1060-mobile/

of which only some have been resolved. The nvidia-340 drivers are the recommended fall back according to the Nvidia linux developers.

Unfortunately, the installation of the current nvidia-340 340.107-0ubuntu2 packaging is in really bad shape. The first error one sees while attempting to install it are dpkg-divert errors like those described in https://askubuntu.com/questions/419304/dpkg-divert-error-rename-involves-overwriting-usr-lib-xorg-protocol-txt-wit but for the files...

/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libEGL.so.1.distrib
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGLESv1_CM.so.1.distrib
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGLESv2.so.2.distrib.
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGL.so.1.distrib

Currently one has to manually move these aside under a .bak suffix to get past these post-removal script errors. I believe these issues may be already addressed in the current nvidia-340 packaging residing on the ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa repo.

The second installation issue that occurs is the same as that described in https://askubuntu.com/questions/969352/uninstalling-and-then-reinstalling-nvidia-384-kills-colord where currently the fix is the same. One has to edit the installed nvidia-340.postinst file and change

NEWEST_KERNEL=$(get_newest_kernel "$(KERNEL")

to
NEWEST_KERNEL=$(get_newest_kernel "$CURRENT_KERNEL")

following executing

sudo dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-340

to allow the installation to cleanly complete. Lastly, there seems to be a missing dependency on the nvidia-340-dev that prevents akmods from building the kernel modules which should be fixed.

The nvidia-340 drivers are supported until the end of 2019 by which time hopefully Nvidia will finally clean up their current issues with the newer drivers on problematic hardware.

https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3142

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.10
Package: nvidia-340 340.107-0ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.18.0-10.11-generic 4.18.12
Uname: Linux 4.18.0-10-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: wl nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.10-0ubuntu13
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Sun Oct 14 12:41:21 2018
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-04-26 (170 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20180425.1)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm-256color
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: nvidia-graphics-drivers-340
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to cosmic on 2018-09-30 (14 days ago)