No text or icons in Menu or task bar after 17.3/18 installation

[pipris]

Installed latest Mint 18 on an old Fujitsu Siemens Celsius R610. There is no legible text and few icons on the task bar and no text on the menu. Everything else on the desktop and in windows is fine. Then installed mint 17.3 with the same result.
However I had earlier installed Mint 10 and this had no problem as text and icons on task bar and menu were fine. Don’t want to try and upgrade from Mint 10, and may get the same problem anyway. Can anyone help?
Screen shot attached.

[Cosmo.]

The link gives an 404 error (not found).

[pipris]

Apologies - not sure how to get the link in, so will try and fix it - if not then here it is again

https://s19.postimg.org/6kmuxculv/Missi ... _icons.png

[Cosmo.]

Most likely a problem with your graphics card / driver.

Open a terminal and enter

Code: Select all

inxi -G

and post the result.

[pipris]

Graphics: Card: NVIDIA NV28GL [Quadro4 980 XGL]
Display Server: X.Org 1.17.1 drivers: nouveau (unloaded: fbdev,vesa)
Resolution: 1680x1050@60.0hz
GLX Renderer: Mesa DRI nv28 x86/MMX/SSE2 GLX Version: 1.2 Mesa 10.5.9

[Cosmo.]

Open the driver manager and install the recommended driver.

[pipris]

Installed the driver manager and ran it. Got two error windows, both saying

Unknown driver
Unknown driver found
Please remove before installing drivers with DDM.

In the main window it displays the hardware correctly and the Activated driver as nouveau. At the bottom it displays Unknown driver: nouveau

Doesn’t seem to be a way within DDM to uninstall unknown drivers. Is there a way to remove all the files relating to the nouveau driver and identify and remove possibly one other unknown driver?

Clicking OK on both messages lists 3 alternative drivers, the first being Nouveau display driver (recommended), which is odd as it seems a nouveau driver installed is unknown. The others being Framebuffer and Vesa. Didn’t activate any as assume as per error message existing driver must be removed or de-activated before activating new. But if I remove the driver, will I still get a display?

[austin.texas]

I would try this tutorial for installing the NVIDIA driver via PPA.

[Cosmo.]

I cannot follow, what you wrote at the beginning: Why did you have to install the driver manager? This is one of the core tools in Mint Cinnamon, so the question, why had it been removed?
I also do not understand, why this tool finds an unknown driver, but shows him as nouveau.

Besides that: It seems, as if there is no proprietary driver for your card in the repositories. I don't know, if there is any at all.

Perhaps the mate edition or the xfce edition would be the better choice for your hardware.

[pipris]

Last time I used Unix (Solaris) regularly was over 20 years ago. I don’t know what is and isn’t in the distro. So when you say driver manager - I don’t know what that is. So I looked up how to install the driver manager, installed it, figured the command was ddm and ran it from a terminal.

DDM found 3 uninstalled Nvidia drivers and then displayed


Clicking OK on the messages gave


The last driver I can find for this card on Nvidia is
GeoProbe 3.1.1
Linux32 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS 3.0 Update 1
Nvidia Driver 1.0-5336 for all graphics cards
...
Quadro4 980 XGL ...

Linux Display Driver - IA32 Version: 1.0-5336 Operating System: Linux IA32
Release Date: January 26, 2004 Release Highlights Support for Linux 2.6 kernels.

But I am guessing 17.3 is not a 2.6 kernel, so doubt this one would still work. I will try installing this NVIDIA driver via PPA, then mate then xfce.

[jimallyn]

STOP! Do not download anything else from the web and install it. You are asking for trouble. Driver Manager is is all current editions of Linux Mint. You do not have to install anything. Click Menu, Administration, Driver Manager.

[Cosmo.]

The Mint driver manager is what you find by default in the menu -> administration -> driver manager. What you installed cries for troubles.

BTW: After booting a fresh installed system (or creating a new user account) you got automatically the welcome screen displayed. You find the driver manager also from this place. Not really hidden.

[pipris]

Didn’t expect or notice the Driver Manager on the welcome screen and closed it to reduce the number of unknown windows on the task bar. Should check before ignoring. Tried it now but all it says is 'no proprietary drivers in use' with 'revert' and 'apply changes' greyed out. No other apparent options/menu/buttons - could this be due to the new DDM download?

I realise now I should have found a screen shot of the menu on the linux pages. This would have given me an idea as to what is where in the default menu and have a better guess as to where to click, but as the problem I am trying to solve is no text or icons (or hints) in the menu, instructions to click on something there has not helped with the solution.

Now found what seems to be the correct proprietary driver on Nvidia (Latest Legacy GPU version (96.43.xx series): 96.43.23) - so will try with that.
(from http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html)

[austin.texas]

I realise now I should have found a screen shot of the menu on the linux pages. This would have given me an idea as to what is where in the default menu and have a better guess as to where to click, but as the problem I am trying to solve is no text or icons (or hints) in the menu, instructions to click on something there has not helped with the solution.

Yes, it would be rather difficult to navigate the menu in it's present condition, wouldn't it?
If you need to open a program, ask here for the command to use in a terminal.

[pipris]

Will do - thanks