Monday, August 07, 2017

Update to 16.04.3 Broke Nvidia Drivers

I tried to force an update to 16.04.3 with the 4.10 kernel and it crashed my Nvidia graphic drivers. This was not unusual as I've had to reinstall my graphic's drivers before after a kernel update.  When I followed my usual steps, it didn't work.  I tried uninstalling the drivers, purging them and even tried to reinstall the generic stock graphic drivers.  In the end I just trashed my system to the point where it wouldn't boot.

By "Forced an Update" I mean updating my Linux Kernel with the following command;
(I recommend against doing this if you're using priority Nvidia Drivers unless they are up-to-date)

sudo apt install --install-recommends linux-generic-hwe-16.04 xserver-xorg-hwe-16.04

As I said that command crashed me, so be careful.  After I did a total reinstall using the 16.04.3 ISO with the 4.10 kernel it worked just fine with priority Nvidia driver.  I noticed I was using and trying to reinstall the NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-361.45.11 version of the driver when it crashed me.  After the clean install and using the Ubuntu Priority Video Driver Install it worked but the the driver version was NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-375.66 so maybe if I used the newer driver I wouldn't have trashed my system. (Note the newest is NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-384.59 but I was scared to try it :-)  )

The data in the Home directory was still readable and I had a newer/bigger SSD laying around so I decided to just start fresh with a clean install.  The reinstall went well and I recovered all the data including my Virtualbox VM's.  The only problem I had was with Photoshop CS2 under wine 2.01.  It wasn't WINE's fault it was mine.  I eventually fixed it and I'll do another post on what went wrong, how to fix it, and how to avoid it.

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