No GUI after natty->oneiric upgrade [SOLVED]

[Lyco]

I have just upgraded my HP Z400 machine from natty to oneiric by do-release-upgrade (after practising this on a number of other machines where everything worked smoothly). Unfortunately, there is a big problem that I am unable to solve on my own.

The upgrade process was ok, no errors or warnings were noticed. After booting into the new system, everything seems to work to some point, and then it stops - before giving me the graphical login screen. Networking is up and I can log into the machine in text mode both from the Ctrl-Alt-F1 console and by ssh. I did not notice any particular problem on the boot screen (after pressing Esc), the last thing it says is 'checking battery status' and then it stops. I don't know enough about upstart to find out what exactly the system is waiting for.

I also tried to open kde from the Ctrl-Alt-F1 console by logging in and typing startx (is this supposed to work, or should I expect it to be blocked by the boot process trying to continue?). What I get is an error message like 'failed to load NVIDIA kernel module' (by the way, it is a 64bit linux and the according to lspci the machine has a nVidia GF108 [Quadro 600] graphics card). Apt-get says that the nvidia driver is current.

Does anybody have a suggestion what else I could try to fix the problem or at least to find out what is going on?

[sithlord48]

Re: No GUI after natty->oneiric upgrade

never upgrade w/ properitary driver installed. your asking for a bad time.. remove your driver useing jockey-cli and install a new one or just use the open source driver.

[SteveRiley]

Re: No GUI after natty->oneiric upgrade

Confirmed. In my case, do-release-upgrade removed the Natty proprietary driver but didn't replace it with the Oneiric driver, because I was using the driver from the X-swat PPA. So in a console session I deleted my xorg.conf and rebooted -- after which the open-source drivers installed. Then I re-enabled the X-swat PPA, installed nvidia-current, ran nvidia-xconfig, rebooted once more, and returned to normal functionality.

[Lyco]

Re: No GUI after natty->oneiric upgrade [SOLVED]

Thanks to sithlord and SteveRiley for the helpful comments.
My problem was in fact related to having the proprietary driver installed before doing the upgrade. I resolved the issue by deinstalling everything nvidia-related and then installing the open-source driver. After a reboot, I got my kdm back.

I then followed somebody else's recommendation and installed the xswat updated driver but I did not notice any difference to the oneiric-bundled one (didn't do benchmarks, though)

The only problem that persists is an occasional freeze of Xorg, typically after doing something in firefox. This problem has been with me for several months, so it is unlikely to be related to the new driver. I never managed to track it down, but I suspect the flash plugin to be involved.