Updating to the newest drivers crashes cinnamon

[miclis]

Hello

Today, my update manager notified my that there is an update for my graphic card's drivers (nvidia-graphics-drivers-304). I updated it to the new version (304.132-0ubuntu0.14.04.2) and rebooted my laptop. After reboot, cinnamon crashed. I rebooted it once again with the same effect. Then, I downgraded the drivers to the previous version. Everything works fine now, but I still do not know why updating drivers crashed my GUI. What is the reason? And how can I install and use new drivers without any problems?

System: Linux Mint 17.3 64bit
Graphic card: Nvidia Geforce G102M
Kernel: 4.4.0-45-generic
Laptop: ASUS K50IN

[I Love My Cat]

I think I have the same issue. After allowing me to input my password, I get a black screen with a thin horizontal line at the bottom and (sometimes) a shallow gray rectangle in the lower right hand corner. I can't see that my keys have any effect other than that Control Alt Delete lets me start over sometimes (and sometimes not).

I'd like to get rid of that update except that I'm now effectively "blind".

Moving the cursor around and clicking randomly off to the right (and sort of into the off screen area) has the effect of occasionally generating another low on the screen horizontal line or a vertical line near the right. And then sometimes I get a solid quarter inch thick horizontal blue line in the center of the screen and various thin blue and red triangles.

[I Love My Cat]

I forgot to add that I have a 64 bit desktop machine, Linux Mint 17/Ubuntu 14.04, and I'm not sure of my NVidia card.

I did a reset to default settings in that hope that that would fix it, but no dice.

PS: inxi -h does nothing.

[Caldor]

Same problem here. Same cause, installing the updates that the update manager showed me. Getting black screen with only mouse cursor visible. Same issue reported on Ubuntu forum as well. https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2342089

No idea how I can fix that, can't do much with a black screen showing nothing but a mouse pointer. Now posting from a fresh Mint install I made from the live CD on another partition.

Edit: 32-bit version here of Linux Mint 17.

[mint-me]

I have had similar problem today upgrading to nvidia-367. Trying different things to get Cinnamon to work properly again.
Hope someone comes up with a solution, I will post if can get it to work again.

[trytip]

boot with a live distro or if you can get to desktop backup your etc/x11/xorg.conf then DELETE it and REBOOT

linux/mint/mate/17.3/x64 here and todays nvidia-340.98 update had no impact for me but i was very reluctant to update since i had my share of BLACK screens with nvidia

[Prsman]

Not to insult any one, deleting my xorg.conf file. Will it fix Cinnamon crashing? I also ran sudo apt-get -F install and sudo dpkg --configure -a.
No errors found.

[I Love My Cat]

boot with a live distro or if you can get to desktop backup your etc/x11/xorg.conf then DELETE it and REBOOT

linux/mint/mate/17.3/z64 here and todays nvidia-340.98 update had no impact for me but i was very reluctant to update since i had my share of BLACK screens with nvidia

I tried downloading Lucid Puppy to make a live cd from: http://puppylinux.org/main/Long-Term-Su ... lucidpuppy
but could never get the MD5 checksum to turn out right. I am attempting to download the file onto an ancient 32 bit Windows XP machine.

And that brings me to a question which I might as well ask before I go any further: would I even be able to fix this problem with a live cd, or do I have to have a live distro on a flashdrive?

[trytip]

i have 2 kernels 4.4.0-45 (which i use daily and is my main kernel) and 3.19.0-73 which i keep as an alternate in case of something. after the nvidia updates today dkms status was cleared and the new driver was only built for my 4.4 kernel which booted fine after the first reboot immediately following the update.

but when trying to boot my 3.19 kernel i got a 800x600 screen and the nvidia drivers not running when using nvidia-settings to test. so in synaptic i re-installed everything nvidia (search synaptic for nvidia and then click the installed tab on the right)

when nvidia was done re-installed it messed up my xorg.conf by renaming it and adding todays date. i had to delete any xorg.conf and then running sudo nvidia-xconfig to create a new nvidia xorg.conf. i rebooted and now i have nvidia loading on both kernels

the crashing you experience could be cause by the xorg.conf i'm not sure

[mint-me]

I got mine fixed. With the new nvidia-367 driver I could not get the nvidia card to de-activate, so ran hot. Reverting to nvidia-340 using Driver Manager didn't do the trick. This process worked for me, dirty approach:

1. Use Driver Manager to select nouveau (default) driver
2. Issue command "sudo apt-get purge nvidia*" to get rid of funny configs
3. Use Driver Manager to select nvidia-340 driver (my previous good working driver)
4. Reboot to a black screen (whoops!)
5. Reboot to the rescue mode and install nvidia-prime and nvidia-prime-applet
6. Reboot and select Intel in nvidia-prime-applet

Now my Optimus graphics runs cool again on Intel card, and GLX is fine too.

Hope this may help others...

[Caldor]

boot with a live distro or if you can get to desktop backup your etc/x11/xorg.conf then DELETE it and REBOOT

...

Tried that, running from a fresh Linux install on another partition now. However, etc/x11/xorg.conf does not exist, neither on the affected install nor on the fresh Linux install.

[I Love My Cat]

So far, I haven't seen anything here that looks like something I can implement. What about just trying to get a cheap used graphics card and getting rid of the NVidia card?

[trytip]

no matter what cheap graphics you get they all use the same chip so it's either intel/radeon/nvidia believe it or not linux mint installs nvidia much better than some other distros but it also suffers from disasters once in a while with these updates especially if you have more than one kernel installed

[I Love My Cat]

no matter what cheap graphics you get they all use the same chip so it's either intel/radeon/nvidia believe it or not linux mint installs nvidia much better than some other distros but it also sufferes from disasters once in a while with these updates especially if you have more than one kernel installed

So do you mean they all use the same chip on their graphics cards? And aren't Intel and perhaps Radon a bit more forthcoming with software than NVidia? If not, then why does NVidia alone have such a bad reputation for cooperation and transparency? Why did Linux creator Linus Torvalds call Nvidia “the single worst company” the Linux community has ever dealt with? Wouldn't that seem to indicate that software for the others would be easier to write?

PS: I'm not looking for better hardware, I'm looking for better software and updates that are more likely to work. I don't think there is anything wrong with the hardware I've got, I think this software problem has put me in an an almost impossible position, one that I'm really too poor to get out of easily. I think I'm going to call a place I know about cheap used stuff and a Linux CD. I got this computer from them in the first place.

[trytip]

my ubuntu 12.04 install with nvidia-295 was one of the easiest and stable nvidia install ever. then nvidia moved on to the next generation version 3.X and all hell broke loose because it now doesn't give the option for underscan or overscan or resize dual monitor but this is the same in windows now. and don't even try to imagine installing nvidia in an arch system cause you will go insane. you know how einstein say the meaning of insane is doing the same task repeatedly and expecting different results? well in linux that's not true i installed nvidia just fine in my kernel 4.4 but when i rebooted to my kernel 3.19 the task did not produce the same results even though i used the same exact actions.

in pclinuxos i had to leave because after a nvidia or xorg update i got an unrecoverable black screen and xorg server would just not want to start

it should not be this hard to install graphics drivers in 2016 in any system period.

so in my case re-installing all nvidia software in synaptic worked BUT before rebooting i had to delete etc/x11/xorg.conf and then running sudo nvidia-xconfig to create a new default nvidia xorg configuration (i never had to do this in linux mint before the latest update)

[I Love My Cat]

my ubuntu 12.04 install with nvidia-295 was one of the easiest and stable nvidia install ever. then nvidia moved on to the next generation version 3.X and all hell broke loose because it now doesn't give the option for underscan or overscan or resize dual monitor but this is the same in windows now. and don't even try to imagine installing nvidia in an arch system cause you will go insane. you know how einstein say the meaning of insane is doing the same task repeatedly and expecting different results? well in linux that's not true i installed nvidia just fine in my kernel 4.4 but when i rebooted to my kernel 3.19 the task did not produce the same results even though i used the same exact actions.

in pclinuxos i had to leave because after a nvidia or xorg update i got an unrecoverable black screen and xorg server would just not want to start

it should not be this hard to install graphics drivers in 2016 in any system period.

so in my case re-installing all nvidia software in synaptic worked BUT before rebooting i had to delete etc/x11/xorg.conf and then running sudo nvidia-xconfig to create a new default nvidia xorg configuration (i never had to do this in linux mint before the latest update)

But did you do this "blind"? That's the problem. I need a simple CD install of some sort of operating system and hardware that will allow me to actually see something.

Right now, I have nothing, absolutely nothing. I would bet that all of my hardware is perfectly fine, and probably 99.999% of the software is too, but what good is any of that if I'm effectively "blind"?

[Caldor]

... Right now, I have nothing, absolutely nothing. I would bet that all of my hardware is perfectly fine, and probably 99.999% of the software is too, but what good is any of that if I'm effectively "blind"?

Lol, same here, in fact I'm now posting from the same hardware, with a fresh Linux Mint install on another partition using the Nouveau graphic driver while the Linux on the main partition using the NVidia 304 drivers is dead and only produces an all-black screen with a mouse pointer. And I have no idea whether and how one can switch that Linux Mint to the Nouveau driver without access to any GUI, i.e. just using the command prompt.

[Atypical User]

... I'm now posting from the same hardware, with a fresh Linux Mint install on another partition using the Nouveau graphic driver while the Linux on the main partition using the NVidia 304 drivers is dead and only produces an all-black screen with a mouse pointer. And I have no idea whether and how one can switch that Linux Mint to the Nouveau driver without access to any GUI, i.e. just using the command prompt.

If you have a mouse pointer, there should be some way to get to a terminal. There should be several terminals already running on ctrl-alt-1 through ctrl-alt-6 when attempting to boot the original install. From there you could conceivably log on and try to remove the nvidia stuff (see Caldor's post below, step 2):

There has to be some tutorial that tells one how to uninstall a package...

Edits: Changed ref from mint-me's post above to Caldor's for more precise "purge" syntax as originally posted by trytip.

[primolarry]

Ah, the good old graphic card drivers...it has been a while. I let my guard down because Mint was behaving way better than Ubuntu, but I will never breake again the number one rule of Linux in the desktop: NEVER, EVER, UPDATE THE **** NVIDIA DRIVERS.

Anyway, I am stuck in the black screen, switch to noveau using recovery mode, remove every nvidia driver, installed the 340 version...and now I am stuck in the black screen and I can't even use recovery to switch to nouveau.

My question is, do you guys know any way to toggle to intel´s graphic card (as nvidia-prime-applet does) using the terminal?

If I can't do that, I will just reinstall from scratch.

Thanks a lot, regards.

[Cosmo.]

To switch to intel:

Code: Select all

sudo prime-select intel

Back to nvidia.

Code: Select all

sudo prime-select nvidia

To see, what is selected:

Code: Select all

prime-select query