I've got kind of a huge problem in my Ubuntu 16.04.
Yesterday I turned the computer on, and was working in my stuff when a message where "some important updates will be installed" appeared. Innocently, I selected the "yes" option.
Then the problems started to appear. Mendeley desktop failed to start, so I ran it from terminal an got this kind of error:
Failed to create OpenGL context for format QSurfaceFormat
I didn't pay too much attention to it, thinking it was a problem of the program itself.
But today I couldn't boot the computer. It normally starts with the BIOS screen (The Ultimate Force is its name), then a gray screen 3 seconds, then a quick list of processes, most of them developed as a green [OK] (thus some got a red [FAILED]) and then boots.
This time after that screen, it appeared another short list where the first 2 lines were the following:
Stopping NVIDIA Persistence Daemon...
[ OK ] Stopped NVIDIA Persistence Daemon.
Then screen turns black. But I could get to tty1 using Ctrl+Shift+F1.
As of it, I looked for information in forums like this one, and tried a solution of the following link: Ubuntu 16.04 nvidia drivers don't work from which I followed the next codelines:
sudo apt-get purge nvidia-*
sudo apt-get install intel-microcode
sudo apt-get install intel-gpu-tools
Reboot
sudo apt-get install nvidia-yyy
Where yyy were any of 396, 390, 384, or 375. Nothing happened, still same issue.
But when yyy was any of 304 (nvidia-current version seems to have stopped in 304) or 340, error changed and the process list I mentioned before, starts saying something like this:
[ FAILED ] Failed to Start Snappy Daemon
A start job is running for ...
Where ... didn't show well what it it was exactly doing, but it were multiple things including, of course, Snappy Daemon (which truly I don't have idea what it is). That kept looping with some weird number code and didn't let me get to any tty. So I was forced to restart manually the computer and follow these instructions: How do I boot into a root shell? where from I could uninstall those old NVIDIA drivers and reinstall the newer ones (installed 384, the one I had before the issues) to, at least, access the tty easily.
Viewing no advance, I tried the next instruction:
sudo apt-get install nvidia*
Which told me that couldn't proceed because "I held broken packages", but something called my attention: ALL the nvidia drivers were informed to have conflict with something called xorg-driver-binary, while the newer had conflict with nvidia-smi and nvidia-persistenced, from which my logic is that somewhere there was the specific problem that I had at the beginning.
Then maybe I did something really dumb in my desperation. Seeing another 2 conflicts, that I show here:
nvidia-libopencl1-384 : Conflicts : libopencl
nvidia-opencl-icd-384 : Conflicts : nvidia-opencl-icd
I thought it was a good idea to install manually those components:
sudo apt-get install nvidia-libopencl1-384
sudo apt-get install nvidia-opencl-icd-384
Called my attention that they were not installed before. So I did it, rebooted, and the error changed. This time after the quick process list screen, it appeared another short list where the last first and last lines are the following:
Starting Thermal Service Daemon...
...
[ OK ] Started Update UTMP about System Runlevel Changes.
So i followed 16.04 - system hangs at boot time, installing xserver-xorg-video-intel, with no results.
Important data of output of inxi -b are more or less the following:
- Kernel: 4.13.0-39-generic x86_64
- Machine model SABERTOOTH 990 FX R2.0
- Graphic Card: NVIDIA GM204 (GeForce GTX 970)
- Graphic Display Server: X.org 1.18.4
- Graphic Driver: FAILED: nouveau
So then i did the following:
sudo apt-get install *nouveau*
And error persisted, with the difference that inxi -b or inxi -Gx didn't tell anymore that nouveau driver failed.
So after all that, I think somewhere there is the main problem (Nouveau as driver instead of the nvidia installed ones), but I don't know how to change that.
Also, I can't turn off Secure Boot mode as other posts suggest because ASUS UEFI BIOS does not have that option (just has "Windows", or "Other Systems"). Neither I can post the real output of some commands since I don't know how to copy them from the damaged computer to this one in which i'm typing this.
I'm giving up for now, but I'm worried because I have important files in this computer and I wouldn't want to do a 16.04 fresh install, since I read that wasn't a sure way to solve the problem.
