[SOLVED] LMDE 4 can't boot after Nvidida driver system update

[champloo]

A couple of days ago, Update Manager notified me of new kernel version (4.19.0-11-amd64). After the update, everything went well. However, today I got a notification from Update Manager regarding new Nvidia driver update. During installation, I received a warning. I was a bit lengthy warning, so I can't really remember what the exact message was, but it was in regard to incompatibility with kernel version. The warning message also said that usually the best way to fix this is to simply restart the system after update. Btw, every time kernel was updated, it was soon after following by Nvidia driver update with the same warning message, followed by a system restart and everything was fine.

However, this time around, system won't boot or it simply hangs at some point during boot process. At some point, I just get a blank screen with a keyboard cursor (_) just blinking at the top-left corner of the screen. Keyboard strokes are not responding at this point, but a restart does occur when I press Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Before the restart, for a moment, this message appears:

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[    18.345776] watchdog: watchdog0: watchdog did not stop!
[    18.909843] reboot: Restarting system

I ran recovery mode after this and a bunch of messages showed up on screen. At some point, everything stopped at this message:

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[    51.209907] r8169 0000:04:00.0 enp4s0: Link is Up - 1 Gbps/Full - flow control off
[    51.210000] IPv6: ADDRCONF (NETDEV_CHANGE): enp4s0: link becomes ready

Again, keyboard strokes are not responding at this point, but Ctrl+Alt+Del can restart the system again.

Does anyone know how to fix this? I use Nvidia GTX 1070.

[antikythera]

boot the previous kernel which is available in the grub menu under the advanced entry. where are you sourcing the nvidia driver from?

[Mike_D]

I'm running a 'GeoForce GT640' card and I can confirm the same issue. I even tried booting into an older kernel, same issue. I settled on performing a Timeshift restore from previous day and set the Update Manager to ignore this Nvidia update.

[champloo]

boot the previous kernel which is available in the grub menu under the advanced entry.

I already tried that and I get the same thing.

where are you sourcing the nvidia driver from?

I didn't understand this.

[antikythera]

Okay to phrase it another way, where did you get the nvidia driver you installed from? Is it a backport from the Debian repositories because if so they are not guaranteed to work.

[champloo]

Okay to phrase it another way, where did you get the nvidia driver you installed from? Is it a backport from the Debian repositories because if so they are not guaranteed to work.

I don't really know, didn't pay attention to that. Update Manager notified me and that's it. One of the reasons I didn't wanna bother myself with paying attention to such things is that I chose Linux Mint since it's supposed to be newbie friendly, where you don't wanna stress out over things like these. When I searched for most convenient Linux distro for newbies a couple of months ago, Linux Mint came out on top, so I wasn't really expecting these kind of troubles.

[SilFox]

When I searched for most convenient Linux distro for newbies a couple of months ago, Linux Mint came out on top, so I wasn't really expecting these kind of troubles.

Well, I think You picked a wrong edition. LMDE is not so user friendly, but Linux Mint 20 is. For experienced users this doesn't matter, but since You mention 'newbies friendly' I strongly suggest You LM20

[antikythera]

When I searched for most convenient Linux distro for newbies a couple of months ago, Linux Mint came out on top, so I wasn't really expecting these kind of troubles.

Well, I think You picked a wrong edition. LMDE is not so user friendly, but Linux Mint 20 is. For experienced users this doesn't matter, but since You mention 'newbies friendly' I strongly suggest You LM20

Agree with that entirely. However, just because there's a new build of drivers available doesn't mean you should use it unless you are experiencing GPU bugs of course.

With nvidia, you should really remove the old driver before attempting to install the newer build anyway (nouveau or fbdev in the meantime should at least give you a display to use). Certainly true for LMDE, as there's an upgrade blocker in the nvidia driver set installed by the meta package. Probably true for LM20 too as it is for all other Linux Distributions I have tried to date.

[champloo]

10 days later, I logged back into LMDE 4, hoping there will be some update which will fix this. Did 'sudo apt update' and 'sudo apt upgrade', but no fix. I ran 'sudo apt install nvidia-driver' and now everything is working again.

There's one thing which worries me, though. When I run 'flatpak list', I get 3 nvidia packages on that list:

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nvidia-440-100
nvidia-440-82
nvidia-450-66

When I ran 'sudo apt install nvidia-driver', I remember that driver nvidia 4.5.0-xx (can't remember exactly which version) was downloaded and installed. What gives? Why these Flatpaks now?