Hello all. I have a dual-boot Ubuntu 12.04/Win8 system running an Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 graphics card.

All worked beautifully until today, doing the first boot after the Ubuntu update yesterday regarding a hardware package of some sort (I recall seeing "HWI" in the update).

Now the system freezes after I log in and I eventually get a black screen of death saying "nouveau E [GPU lockup - switching to software fbcon".

I suspect this may be something related to the graphics card and the hardware package update (but I haven't been using Linux that long, so I could easily be wrong.)

Does anyone know what this might be, or how to restore the previous system functionality?

Thanks much!

To follow-up, if I use the recovery boot option, with the "continue" option, the system runs properly except that the graphics are lower-resolution and the "Displays" tool only shows a "Laptop" display.

The issue seems to be with the open-source Nouveau graphics drivers that are installed by default with Ubuntu. I found an additional proprietary driver (NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver), and activated it. The system is now running normally again.