Ubuntu 12.04 ruined my life
 

Hello,

I was running 11.10 for quite some time without any issues. Today I upgraded to 12.04 and have had nothing but problems. I was having issues with my graphics card driver. The screen resolution was ginormous and whenever I tried to open the Nvidia x-settings it kept saying something to the effect of I need to run nvidia-xconfig and restart the X server.

Well every time I tried running sudo nvidia-xconfig it was saying it can't be run. I can't even cut and paste the exact message since I can no longer log into my system. The last thing I did was go into additional drivers and remove the nvidia-current driver. I then re-installed the nvidia driver and rebooted.

Once I rebooted, I tried to login. It accepts my password but just comes right back to the login screen. Can someone please help me get back into my system, and then quide me on how to get the activated nvidia driver to be "in use"

Your help is much appreciated!!!

You didn't happen to update with Update Manager did you?

My advice is to download an iso and burn a CD or put it on a USB and do a fresh install. Less chance of problems if you do it that way.

What has been done can't be undone! But my advice for future, always download the live image and burn it on a USB stick or a CD and test it on the target system.

Since you are unable to login to your earlier account, the issue may with permissions to your critical files.I hope somebody on this forum is able to help you out. I can understand your frustration as I too have faced this. I had to go to a virtual terminal and change permissions of all files in /home/user/ using the chown command. After that I was able to login properly.

Now, I always use a live USB to test a new release of Ubuntu on my system before installing it.

It sounds to me that X server can't start. Check your /var/log/xorg.0.log file to verify. Look for lines starting with (EE).

Consider switching to the generic vesa driver temporarily so you can log in. Another option is to download the nvidia source from their site, and rebuilding the driver from source.

Hello All,

After a long weekend I'm back in the office and trying to fix my linux machine. Thank you all for the comments. I applied all updates to 11.10 and then upgraded to 12.04 through update manager. Looks like I will have to create a bootable USB drive with 12.04 and try to reload my machine. I don't know any other way of logging in to my system.

Hmmm - don't hold onto too much hope.

I always do a clean install - using a shared /home partition to ease the transition. I have basically given up on Ubuntu, but her ladyship has it on a netbook.
So .... - while she was at her mums for (Aus) mothers day over the weekend, I decided to slap Precise on the netbook. What a cock-up. Claws-mail wouldn't recognise any accounts, and wouldn't allow any to be added (all options greyed out). Machine continually locked up after 15 minutes or so (as others have reported).
On reverting to Oneiric, had to remove (purge) claws-mail and re-install. Mail is the primary reason for existence of this machine.

I'd be advising all and sundry to take Ubuntus own advice and leave this until the first refresh (July ???).
This one seems worse than normal - hard to believe I know.

This release on a timetable thing they have is ridiculous. They held Dapper back for 2 months so they should get it right. I suggested they do it with 10.04 and was howled down by all the fanboys telling me if I didn't like it I could use another distro. It's obvious they just haven't learned.
lol

I'm thinking of just re-imaging with BT5 R2 since I've been wanting to use it for some time now. OR maybe I'll dual boot it with 12.04. Not sure yet.... What do you guys think?

I previously created a bootable flash drive with 11.04 using unetbootin. Can someone please provide any info on upgrading my bootable flash drive to 12.04? Update Manager wants me to upgrade, but that didn't work so well when I tried to upgrade my PC. Is there another way to update my bootable flash drive or do I have to erase it and start over?

I'd boot to some live media of any version that can access logs. Not sure it is the x but it is a great place to start to diag.

BT5 is not a good choice.

The problem with trying to update the files is that it may or may not work. Might ask about syslinux version but may work. Not too hard to create a new version.

All you really need to do is reload the backup and then consider how to wish to proceed.

@jschiwal Sorry, this post is not related to the question being discussed here, rather with your signature. Nifty piece of code, and rather useful one too. But it doesn't seem to be working with me.It would be useful to me to have man pages converted to kindle-compatible format.

Very odd... after seeing more than a few stories like this about failed upgrades, I was more than a bit apprehensive about it myself. I upgraded my laptop from 11.10 to 12.04 last week - but I backed up /home to another partition, used clonezilla to make a backup image of the whole HDD, and then did a clean re-install and restored /home from the backups.

Last night, I backed up /home on my desktop, and took the plunge of upgrading via the Update Manager. Took a while, but so far, so good. Not a problem one... <shrug>

Hmm well at least not everyone is having issues with Ubuntu's latest and greatest distribution.

Linux desktop ... an exercise for masochists. Like me ... but not anymore. I need to do my work, not spend a lifetime fixing distros, learn the re-invented wheels of thousands of new developers/recent graduates that need to demonstrate how smart they are and have thousands of users waste hours, days, weeks, months to figure out how things that used to work alright, and were perfectly fine as they were, work now ... time for the geeks to figure things out ...
-TioP

Don't be like that, it keeps some of us in work ... :p