Kubuntu 14.04 LTS Update Disaster

[stuarte]

Hi all,

Yesterday I updated my system with the patches that the Muon Updater said were available. Now I am no longer able to boot the system to the (KDE) desktop. The bootup gets as far as displaying the Kubuntu logo, which fades up to blue-white about six times. At that point the monitor is put into power saving mode. There are occasional dim flickers from the (separate) /home HDD access LED. I also noted that during the updating, Muon displayed a message to the effect that it was going to remove the NVidia driver for my (old FX5200) graphics card.

Could some kind soul please guide me through some sort of rescue process that would allow the system to once again boot to the desktop ?!

I need to get this system back up as it is to be my embedded Linux development platform and already has various embedded tools installed.

Any help you can give with this would be much appreciated.

Best regards,

Stuart

[claydoh]

Hmm this could be an Nvidia bug mentioned elsewhere here, where screen
blanking happens before the login manager comes up.

When you get that blank screen, try simply typing on your password and hitting enter as you would normally do.

If this works, one workaround is to use autologin.

For some reason I was thinking this was a 14.04-15.10 upgrade, so the above is not relevant

[claydoh]

Some background; I need to locate a launchpad bug report on this.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2293682

[stuarte]

Good afternoon claydoh,

Thank you for your swift replies. I've just tried your initial suggestion, about blindly entering my password. I'm sorry to say that this did not work. It seems that once the monitor has been put into power saving mode (the anular LED around the on/off button switches from blue to amber), nothing "wakes" it up. I tried moving the mouse, pressing the "Alt Gr" key and the space bar, each a few times. The monitor stubbornly stayed in power save mode (the anular LED remained amber throughout).

I'm at a loss to as to how to proceed from here. As I still have Kubuntu 14.04 LTS on DVD/RW, I'm going to investigate if this copy of the distro can be used in some form of rescue mode. However, even if this(!) boots to a usable desktop, I'm still uncertain as to how to get the NVidia driver reinstalled using this. As my PC has both a DVD-ROM drive and a DVD burner installed, and as I have a much older copy of the NVidia driver on an old magazine cover DVD, I will investigate if this older driver can somehow be installed in this way.

I will keep you updated on how this goes. Once again thank you for your help thus far.

Best regards,

Stuart

[Snowhog]

Are you able to boot into Recovery (single-user) mode from the Grub menu?

[stuarte]

Good afternoon,

@Snowhog: Yes I verified earlier today that I can get into the grub menu and from there drop into a root shell. How does that help me to re-install the NVidia driver for my graphics card ?

Best regards,

Stuart

[Snowhog]

Is your processor 32- or 64-bit?

[stuarte]

Good afternoon Snowhog,

My, or should I say the PC's processor, is 32-bit. It's a Pentium 4 @ 2GHz with 2 GB RAM.

Best regards,

Stuart