nvidia issues after update to U5

[at2marty]

I ran into an odd problem while updating, and not sure if it was my fault or perhaps the update process.

After doing the update, what happened was the nvidia drivers for my card failed to work correctly. I suspect that what happened was the update was done in two stages, and my impatience might have caused the issue. Anyway, I will describe what I saw and what I did to correct it.

First, when the update hit my machine, it appeared to me that the Update Manager GUI was not working correctly, so I killed it and opened up a terminal (I'm more comfortable working in a terminal anyway). I did the following:

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apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

I downloaded and upgraded around 1008 packages. During the update, I was prompted about differences between configuration files, which I can understand and seem normal. Once the upgrade was complete, I did a reboot, thinking that a bunch of major packages just got upgraded, and some stuff probably needed to be re-started.

When my system came up, I was greeted with the ! icon from the Update Manager indicating that there were updates available. I opened it up, and sure enough it listed around 600+ more packages that needed to be upgraded. I went ahead and chose to install the updates, and went about my merry way. When it was done, I went ahead and did a reboot (old Windows habit) and low-and-behold, the X server would not start. I ran the following and tried to reboot again.

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sudo nvidia-xconfig

The X server still would not start! I don't remember the exact error in the X server log, but I did note that it was looking for an older nvidia driver that had supposedly been updated. Sure enough I did

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ls /var/cache/apt/archives/nvid*

and it listed pacages for versions 295.20-1 and 302.17-2. What I ended up doing was copying all of the 302.17-2 packages to root's home folder

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sudo cp -v /var/cache/apt/archives/nvid*302* /root/

I then became the root user. HUGE WARNING! DO NOT do this unless you know what you are doing!

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sudo su -

I then re-installed all of the packages using this command.

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dpkg -i *.deb

After a re-boot, everything is working as it should.

Again, this may have been my mistake and my fault, but I thought that others may possibly learn from this and maybe be able to correct any problems that they might have. I suspect that what happened was the updated nvidia packages got installed prior to the newer kernel packages being installed.

[melbo]

I believe its always advised to dist-upgrade with LMDE?

I use SMXI and was able to reinstall my nvidia drivers after the upgrade.

[zerozero]

i think too that the main issue here was splitting the updates in upgrade in a first stage and then after the reboot run mintupdate that equals to a dist-upgrade; somehow in the middle of this process the drivers were installed before the new kernel (that was only installed when you ran mintupdate) and dkms missed the build of the new drivers;

this way you recreated something similar to this http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=198&t=67502&start=1880#p604879

[at2marty]

Thank you both for the responses.

Can either of you elaborate a bit more? For example, I had never even heard of dist-upgrade. When should that be used, and should the apt-get upgrade command not ever be used?

What exactly is SMXI? I have never heard of such a thing.

Also, if I understand correctly, mintupdate=dist-upgrade, so that kind of tells me that the icon that shows up on my panel is pretty much useless unless there is a major update to the current system?

I am somewhat of a "newbie" when it comes to Debian, but I am quite familiar with Linux in general. Most of my experience has been around rpm type package management as well as building from source. I'm not asking for a "step-by-step" tutorial, just an explanation. Perhaps I'll find the time to RTFM when I get a chance.

[fiver22]

The answer to your first question that I like best for its succinctness is ""upgrade is used to install the newest versions of all packages currently installed on the system
...
dist-upgrade, in addition to performing the function of upgrade, also intelligently handles changing dependencies with new versions of packages" -see http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions ... ost1120653 for some more detail.

SMXI: one of my (and many others' favourite non-official Debian tool) see http://smxi.org/ -basically it is a set of scripts that modify/automate common tasks in Debian -adding some common/useful packages, generating system info, pulling in graphics drivers and configuring xorg for you, etc. To install it, see http://smxi.org/site/install.htm#install-with-zip

To use it you run as root/ with sudo smxi in a terminal it will ask you to kill X, when you select 'yes' it will put you into a shell and you run smxi again to start the script questions. It is very 'noob friendly' in the way it presents info and asks if you are certain you want to apply each operation.
One of the most used part of smxi is the sgfxi section which you can run by itself or can be accessed by running smxi. What it does is find and install the proper graphics driver for your system and configures X to use it. For example when I run it it finds the latest proprietary Nvidia driver for my card. -It doesn't install nvidia-settings by itself, but I can easily install that with apt-get install nvidia-settings).
Hope that answers a couple of your questions.