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I have a 22.04 machine with an old-ish Nvidia GPU which worked perfectly until today, when I got a message that updates were available, and I chose to install them. Installation concluded successfully, and I got a message that a reboot was required. I clicked "Reboot now", and it rebooted. But after the reboot, the graphical desktop didn't load - all I had was a small cursor flashing in the top left corner.

The text terminals are available, though, but only at very low resolution. I can log in, and I have internet access. Lots of stuff about gdm-x-session in /var/log/syslog, but I'm not really into the nitty-gritties surrounding Ubuntu - I mainly just use it. So I'm at a loss - how to go about troubleshooting this?

For the record, I've now tried rebooting three times - same result.

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    How did you install the Nvidia drivers? Also, can you boot into an older kernel?
    – mchid
    Commented Jan 11 at 22:24
  • @mchid I'm not sure how, or even if, I've installed Nvidia drivers - if I have, it's a long time ago. And I'm not sure what you mean by "boot into an older kernel"...?
    – OZ1SEJ
    Commented Jan 12 at 12:41
  • General comment: I must say, I'm somewhat disheartened by seeing someone downvote my question. It's an honest question, I can't use my computer, so I'm asking for help. I thought that was the point of this website...
    – OZ1SEJ
    Commented Jan 12 at 13:27
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    This might happen if you downloaded the drivers from the nvidia website and installed them manually. A kernel update would leave you with no drivers as you would need to reinstall for a newer kernel. Boot into an older kernel through the grub menu. On the grub menu, select Advanced Options for Ubuntu and then select a version that is not the newest one listed.
    – mchid
    Commented Jan 12 at 19:04
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    If you did download and install the drivers manually, you can install them properly by running sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall so that they will update automatically when there's a kernel update.
    – mchid
    Commented Jan 12 at 19:05

3 Answers 3

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If you did download and install the drivers manually, you can install them properly by running

sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

so that they will update automatically when there's a kernel update.

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A bit more googling...

  • It's a conflict between the 6.5 kernel and the nvidia-390 driver

  • To get nvidia drivers working you need to downgrade the kernel to the 6.2 series.

  • At the grub menu boot into a 6.2 kernel. This is usually done by holding shift at boot and then picking advanced options to pick a different kernel. You usually have at least the previous kernel. I couldn't get the menu to show so I had to disable hiding the menu and set a 10 second delay before the default option was automatically loaded. (Grub menu at boot time... "holding shift" not working)

  • When you are logged in with the 6.2 kernel you can remove the 6.5 kernel. See How do I remove newest kernel?

For me this was:

sudo apt purge linux-image-6.5.0-14-generic
sudo apt purge linux-headers-6.5.0-14-generic

After a restart I could install nvidia drivers again :)

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same thing here with a Nvidia Quadro 2000.

I "fixed" by removing the nvidia drivers. It's not my primary machine so I could afford to be aggressive as my alternative would have been a full re-install.

sudo apt remove --purge nvidia-*
sudo shutdown -r 0

On restart I had a working desktop. No nvidia drivers, but I'll take a working desktop over a potentially faster non-working desktop.

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  • Thank you for your suggestion. I use this computer for flight simulation, so the graphics performance is fairly important. That said, when I get home, I'll try and see if it works!
    – OZ1SEJ
    Commented Jan 12 at 12:43

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