Hi,

This problem seems to have some common solutions, none of which have worked for me so far.

I get this when opening software center in the past few hours:

"New software can't be installed, because there is a problem with the software currently installed. Do you want to repair this problem now?"

Clicking "repair" several times hasn't fixed it, nor have commands like:

and

Though these have been mentioned elsewhere as solutions for a few people.

My OS otherwise seems to run pretty normally, as far as someone as green as me can tell.

Any fixes for this? I'd hate to format again, especially since my complicated Steam setup takes so long to complete. Thanks!

Please post the exact output of the commandsand the contents of /etc/apt/sources.list.

Ugh. Unfortunately, I just tried rebooting into Ubuntu, and for some insane reason, after the loading screen a black screen with a giant NVidia logo just sits there indefinitely(or, at least, I waited about 5 minutes and nothing more happened.) I know I entered those commands a few times, but I didn't do anything video card related, so why it's hijacked(and possibly wrecked) my Ubuntu installation I don't know.

At this point this could be a topic for another thread, but please let me know if you might have a solution for this so we can get back to the terminal output stuff. Thanks!

How did you install the video drivers?

I went to software and updates, and just chose the proprietary one(not the one that says "proprietary, tested." Is this a fixable problem?

Also, I did this a few days ago right after installing Ubuntu. It worked normally until now, which is odd.

I don't know how the Ubuntu land is, but I remember this in the past when I was using version 12.10. I installed the NVIDIA drivers and I too was presented with tty1. So much for a so-called newbie-friendly distro

Can you check if you have Unity installed?

I can't even boot up Ubuntu, so I can't type any of this in. It just hangs at the NVidia logo indefinitely(or, at least, it does for several minutes, which is an insane boot up time on a fancy 8-core processor and 16GB RAM.)

My first priority is to find out if I'll ever be able to boot it up again somehow without having to reinstall Ubuntu, which would be a bit of a disaster--I not only have Steam set up and my games installed, but they're on an NTFS shared partition and I imagine getting them all to work with it on a new install of Ubuntu/Steam would be more than a bit frustrating.

You can recover your SteamApps folder with a LiveCD, if you want.

If you decide to install a system on it, I recommend Debian. It's a much more matured system, far better in all regards.

The LiveCD sounds interesting. I imagine Steam has some way of simply restoring a library folder without even doing that(in fact I'm almost certain) but I can't recall how for the moment.

In all regards? My friends generally say it's incredibly stable, but not as user-friendly. I'm way too green *if* that's the case, and I use Linux to do things I was already doing on Windows more efficiently--I like to learn a bit about it, but only enough to use programs/the web/games the way I normally wanted to before I ever started using it. In other words, my time is limited if Debian does require significantly more knowledge to run. If not, I may consider it.

But then, I also have Mint on another partition here, as well as other distros, so I can also try them--but the bottom line is that I normally don't have problems like this with Ubuntu, and to be fair, I was entering a lot of commands for the first time in a desperate attempt to fix this, so it easily could ultimately be my own mistake--or NVidia's, for that matter, given their logo is taunting me now and not letting my OS boot.

By the way, if you meant earlier the Unity desktop, then I know I have that installed, as it's on there by default.

When your system is up and running you can create BackUp's of the games, this way you can restore them later. You still can save your SteamApps folder right now, but it's going to ocupy more space. Then you past it back, and click to install the games. Steam will then verify the existing files, recognize the games, and have them installed already.

The knowledge required to run Debian isn't greater than to run Ubuntu, specially considering Ubuntu is pretty much a hit-and-miss distro that you simply don't know how it will behave the next reboot. The usual apt-get commands will get you going for years.

Sounds good. Is it likely I can get Ubuntu bootable again so I can at least back up the games, or should I just bite the bullet and reinstall? I have a huge 2TB partition the games are in, so even a copy of the Steam library folder wouldn't be that big a deal if I needed it for a day or two.

Debian sounds interesting, but I definitely should test it first. Luckily, I already have extra partitions for messing with distros. Why is Ubuntu by far so much more widely used?

I had this happen before. My /boot was filled. I used a liveCD and manually cleaned out the older stuff. Rebooted and used Synaptics and a few CLI commands to clean up Ubuntu.

That sounds like something worth trying. Do you know of a tutorial somewhere that explains how to do this, or should I just boot Ubuntu with a live USB stick and delete certain files from /boot? Thanks for the input.

I will post something tonight. I have notes at home on what to do to clean up Ubuntu.

Great! Thanks a lot.