Hi Everyone. I am very new to Linux Mint 19.3. Removed Win 10 from my personal laptop Vostro 2011 model and enjoying it very much. This afternoon I saw there are a couple of updates available in my tray and I decided just to select ALL and update . Not sure if that is the right way to do things. Anyway, the Penquin told me to reboot, and I did as told.

the problem is that my whole screen is now full of lines of text or code that I dont understand. It moves on slowly. So far taken about an hour. The text looks like this:

[787.18372] [UFW BLOCK] IN=wlp2so OUT= MAC=01:00:5e:00:00:01:28:3b:82:62:53:ab:08:00 SRC=10.0.02 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN36=36 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=0 DF PROTO=2

And there are millions of these lines. It moves on every 20 seconds and changes a little, especially the MAC= part.

Im too scared to press and hold the ON/OFF button cause I just moved all my emails etc to Thunderbird and connected my OneDrve to sync which took 4 days to get right. LOL.

Any suggestions.

Regards
Antonius

The latest updates included kernel updates which your pc may be struggling with. Hopefully your machine has finished rebooting by now but, if not, you should not lose any data if you restart. You could try booting with an older kernel (advanced settings in the bootscreen menu) to see if that is faster.

Looks like it is already booted and not yet to gui. Firewall blocking something on wifi from what I see I think maybe.

Rather than using the GUIfied updater, next time open a console and do:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Aptitude runs a lot faster from the command line."apt" is a Mint command line alias for "aptitude".

It's unusual.

I generally look at the list of updates - then choose to accept them all.

No experience with Mint, but it should be similar to any *buntu, and a major update (say, a kernel update to HWE 5x) could very well give you problems! Luckily, as a post above mentions, you can boot into the older kernal (from before the update started) from your boot screen (options may vary depending on the machine as to how you get to that.) Then you can use the Mint or *buntu update software to remove the updates (to the kernel or whatever is causing the problem) and always boot to the older version. You can then reject any non-security updates. You could also install a different version on a partition and see how it runs, your data should be fine and readable from either partition. (It's actually a good idea most of the time to separate your data from your OS partitions for this very reason, and so you can easily access data other than say browser cookies, history, or bookmarks, directly from any OS you load. The latter two are easy to import from backup, by the way.) ALSO, mentioning backup... how about backing the system up, especially data, on a simple external USB drive?

It is safe to press the power to reboot. At the grub screen you can select the older kernel and see if that works. Since the gui is not working after the reboot, there was probibly some driver that got updated and is not happy.
If you can login using the older kernel, you can look at the update manager again and see if there are still updates. the
If so, try command line update method mentioned as that will give you better feedback. If it asks to overwrite anything it is generally safe to take the default.

@Lecuona did you attempt to install or modify a firewall before you re-booted ?.
I looked at a slightly older Mint and it had ufw, but it was inactive, as you would expect. Not sure if I installed it, or it ships like that. The default rule set will block incoming traffic, including that multicast traffic from your router, but it probably shouldn't spit out logs like that by default.
I would think Lecuona has been doing something, else there would be a barrage of complaints.

I would guess a reboot back to an older kernel may not work as the ufw service will simply get restarted again. Hope I'm wrong.

@syg00,

If the guess that a firewall is potentially the problem and an old kernel will not work, then what would be the recommendation? Boot via live media and fix that way?

That is what I would have done, but I just tested on Mint - they have a "Advanced" option on the boot menu. Brings up a submenu that has "recovery mode" entries - gets a menu where a root shell (bash not busybox) is available. Looks like the old runlevel 1.
I was able to disable ufw from there and continue the boot.

Might be easiest for a new user, but we need to hear back from the OP.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks everyone for the help.

I eventually just pressed the ON/OFF button from a while and restarted.
I don't have a firewall on our modems.
I think it must have something to do with NVidia graphics card as I have read it can be an issue.
The PC hangs every time I boot up at the small green LM logo. Then I have to shut down, restart and do it a couple of times.
I will browse issues on this site regarding Nvidia drivers etc and see if I have the right versions.
BTW I am completely new to Linux so most of the command line stuff you say I have to do goes over my head .

@Utek --> "At the grub screen you can select the older kernel and see if that works." Yes, I think this is an option, I will try and figure that out and apply.

Anyway thanks so much for all the answers.
Regards
Antonius

1 members found this post helpful.

The firewall is on Mint - and this issue has no evidence on an nVidia problem. Flailing around won't help.

To get to an old kernel, reboot, and when the screen goes blank, hit the <Esc> key - that should bring up a boot menu. Use the "down arrow" key to highlight the "Advanced" option and hit <Enter>. Down-arrow to the second non-"Recovery mode" entry and hit <Enter>.
Does that work ?.

1 members found this post helpful.

Pressing the "Advanced" option shows you all the kernels you can boot from.

The top one is the latest one (the one with problems)
The next one down (with a different version number on it) is your previous kernel and so on...

It is usual to only keep the last 2 or 3 versions kernels - but that's something for the future.
You can keep more.

Hi

I tried using a different Kernal and now it boots up nicely, slowly but at least it boots up.

I had an Ubunto installation on a 2004 machine that was 10 times faster in loading, Maybe there is more to load now in Mint.

Thanks for all the help.
Regards
Antonius

1 members found this post helpful.

So it's the kernel that's the problem and not the firewall.

1 members found this post helpful.