Black Screen o' Death, but maybe not driver problem

[doctordruidphd]

I read the thread " Black screen with Xcursor after upgrade from Yakkety", and there was indeed a problem with the nvidia 340 kernels not being installed. I did a manual install for the 340 driver (My card is likely too old for more recent drivers) and it installed the kernels; lsmod shows they are loaded. But still no login screen. I tried doing a dpkg-reconfigure for lightdm, and lightdm starts, though it goes no where after logging in, same with xdm. (I don't know how to get these to start kde).

But after doing a dpkg-reconfigure and selecting sddm, still the black screen. It goes no where; it writes nothing to /var/log/sddm.log. It does not do any hard disk reading, so I think it just quits, though "ps aux sddm" shows it is there. Is sddm no longer the recommended display manager, and if so, what is?

Not sure why it isn't working, as Xorg.0.log doesn't show any problems, either. I have this nagging feeling that do-release-upgrade's autoremove function may have zapped something that really wasn't obsolete.

Also, I used to know how to get nouveau to run -- any reminders?

Thanks.

UPDATE: I purged the 340 driver, nouveau kicked in, and everything seems to be working. Strange, from all indications, 340 compiled and ran correctly, but it didn't. I guess the video card is just too old, but it is working fine with nouveau, so I will leave it at that.

[kayvee]

In my case, I purged nvidia drivers and booted the computer. Once it started fine, I went to the kubuntu driver manager tool and installed the nvidia drivers from there. After restarting again, the computer booted fine. If you are feeling adventurous, you too can give it a try. After all, if you end up with a black screen, you can always purge nvidia drivers again ;-)