Mint 17 broken by large software update

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fruitkiller

Mint 17 broken by large software update

Post by fruitkiller »

Alright, I'm kinda sick of reinstalling, even if I have backed up my software selection and have my own compilations of ffmpeg as a working .deb I made myself which is really great (integrates x264).

I usually do level 4 and 5 updates without a problem, but I've encountered this time something I hadn't seen since I was using Ubuntu 11.10 and updated to the totally hideous 12.04 version (which brought me to Mint eventually).

I've had a lot of updates telling me that this would change something and ask me if I wanted to replace it with the new config or not, there's like 5 or 6 letters you can enter as answers, it's not your regular update for sure, it seems to change something deep inside the system. I've gotten many of them and just said yes to it all because it was a kinda new install (maybe had been around for 3 weeks, because one of my hard drives' circuit board broke and with it my functioning linux mint 17. I know more than well how installing new versions of the kernel and headers and libc-bin, those are important updates indeed, but there was more than that, from the last batch of updates as of the beginning of the week, Mint 17 broke itself because I said Yes to all these config changes. Now I'm greeted with the Mint logo to a black screen with a flat cursor that doesn't blink, if I do ctrl+alt+f2 it goes to a black screen, if I go back to ctrl+alt+f1, it will tell me with broken screens that X could not start, so it's just an issue of my proprietary AMD driver. I boot in single user mode, and login as root, can't install the driver again, everything's locked because everything is read only.....that didn't use to be the case back in 13,14,15 (don't know about 16) or with Ubuntu 12.04 the time i've used it, I switched to Mint 13 when 12.10 wouldn't work at all in gnome classic.

What's going on here, and I bet you guys know what kind of serious updates cause this, I just want to be able to login ffs, like with ctrl+alt+f2, kill X, install driver, startx and voila like I used to do, but with regular booting doing c+a+f2 just gives me a black screen, same as f3 or f4 etc. and this thing about the repair mode making everything read only while i'm in there is bizarre, unless it telling me i'm root when using my regular user is what is causing this....I'm gonna be trying to force in the ability to login as root (who has normally a different password than the sudo password) and see what happens. In the meantime, I need your help. I'm not doing it already i'm sticking to win7 x64 ultimate for now, i'm drained from a night of working at the lab (I'm a chemist, not a computer related work job, for the most part, but its always been a hobby of mine, especially when I was put on ADD meds, Dexedrine, which suddenly makes me interested in everything, 2 years ago I learned how to use linux very fast and can do a lot in the command line and compile programs myself etc. but this confuses me. I can't find much help using many search engines regarding linux mint 17 and the latest batch of updates, why is it me that has to get the freak bugs ? heh.

Hope you can help, thanks in advance.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 2 times in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
eanfrid

Re: Mint 17 broken by large software update

Post by eanfrid »

fruitkiller wrote:I've had a lot of updates telling me that this would change something and ask me if I wanted to replace it with the new config or not, there's like 5 or 6 letters you can enter as answers, it's not your regular update for sure, it seems to change something deep inside the system. I've gotten many of them and just said yes to it all
Unfortunately, the normal, default and safe answer in Debian-based systems has always been "N" for "no" here. You killed your system all by yourself while repeatedly giving the wrong answer. You could have chosen "D" to see the differences between old and new config files.
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karlchen
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Re: Mint 17 broken by large software update

Post by karlchen »

Hello, fruitkiller.

Sorry to read that a Mint 17 "mega update" managed to break your system.
I've had a lot of updates telling me that this would change something and ask me if I wanted to replace it with the new config or not, there's like 5 or 6 letters you can enter as answers, it's not your regular update for sure, it seems to change something deep inside the system. I've gotten many of them and just said yes to it all
Without hard fact what the confirmation dialogues really told you it is almost impossible to tell. - But - about 2.5 months ago Ubuntu 14.04, which Mint 17 is based upon, advanced to Ubuntu 14.0.4.1, this is Ubuntu 14.04 service pack 1. When this happend, a small number of Ubuntu software packages brought along version files which basically only changed the version string from "14.04" to "14.04.1". The installer noticed that the corresponding Mint 17 files held different version strings and asked you for each file whether you wanted to keep the current file (default answer) or whether you wanted to use the new file or whether you wanted to be shown the differences.
The default answer to keep the existing file would have been the right answer.
But accepting the new file will do no harm, either, because on every reboot Mint 17 makes sure that these files are the correct ones, identfying your system as Mint 17.
So this will very likely not be the source of your current trouble. - On this point I disagree with eanfrid. - Yet, without knowing all the details, we cannot be sure.

I suspect that the root cause will be related to updates which have changed your graphic driver software and/or the X.org software. This is why X cannot be started.

In order to get any idea how to address the problem, it will be necessary to knwo as much about your Mint 17 system configuration as possible.
So you will have to boot your Mint 17 and run

Code: Select all

inxi -Fxz
and somehow get the complete screen output here for inspection.

One way of achieving the goal would be this:
  • Boot Mint 17. Login to the console monitor.
  • Run

    Code: Select all

    inxi -Fxz > ~/inxireport.txt
    inxi will write the screen output to the file inxireport.txt in your home folder.
  • Plugin a USB pendrive, mount it and write the file inxireport.txt to it. Umount the pendrive.
  • Reboot to Windows, in case this is a dual boot system. Else simply use your Windows system. Post the content of the file inxireport.txt here for inspection.
Also, please, write down any error message that you read and post it here. Without any precse error messages it will be really hard to give any helpful piece of advice.

Kind regards,
Karl
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karlchen
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Re: Mint 17 broken by large software update

Post by karlchen »

Hello, fruitkiller.

Is this post
fruitkiller wrote:Yes, because of fatigue I had forgotten all can be fixed in grub using the "e" edit button, I've managed to boot up, have a cursor by doing nomodeset 1280x1024x24 then I was able to get a login screen (prompt) when typing in ctrl+alt+f2 and install my amd drivers (multiple video cards in crossfire). Should have read before posting, sorry. This really works btw, I thought nomodeset would work as it was said it would show a command prompt login right away but that didn't happen here, I had to do the specific Qiana edit.

I'm so glad not to have to reinstall, this made my day (and night), I can go to bed satisfied now, especially since I fixed another problem today (unrelated to LM17, but I couldn't get my motherboard to make my Corsair Vengeance 1866mhz memory work at 1866mhz, now I experience such power, it would get locked at 900mhz, now LM17 feels like it should, really fast).
actually the solution to the problem report at this top of this page?

Kind regards,
Karl
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