How can I prevent my NVidia Jetson TK1 from automatically booting the GUI (black screen after a software-update crash), and bring it back to normal?

Question

I am working with an NVidia Jetson. The Ubuntu software update crashed, and now as I fear the system will not boot properly.

The way the system is configured, a command prompt flashes for an instant before an NVidia graphic comes up and normally the Ubuntu GUI follows.

Someone suggested holding shift during boot, but this did nothing.

Holding shift is supposed to bring up grub (which you might have enabled by default). Try choosing "Recovery mode", and see what you can do there. Among other things, even though it gives black screen, you should be able to access tty 1 - 6, (Ctrl+Alt+F1 ) — Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy, Nov 11 '14 at 07:56
Thanks. So far I got to command line from ctrl alt f1. Did a sudo dpkg --configure -a and also apt-get reinstall of unity and ubuntu desktop but still get black screen on reboot. — user391339, Nov 11 '14 at 08:00
On a few posts here what helped some folks was installing another greeter. For some weird reasons, original unity greeter might not work. Try 'sudo apt-get install lightdm-gtk-greeter', and once done, edit /etc/lightdm.conf file by adding "[SeatDefaults]" and "greeter-session=lightdm-gtk-greeter " lines. Basically same stuff I described here. It works for some folks, but since you're messing with graphics card, it's probably not greeter. But hey, no harm in trying, right ? — Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy, Nov 11 '14 at 08:25
Just realized you've posted an answer bellow. Disregard the comment about the greeter, I guess. As for troubleshooting longer than usual black screen that you mentioned, you could look for error s or warnings during startup using dmesg --level=err,warn command — Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy, Nov 11 '14 at 08:37

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited Feb 27 '17 at 10:17

I was able to get to the command line using Ctrl+Alt+F1.

Then, I was able to follow one user's instructions on this thread. It was not necessary to recover the system from USB.

In your /home/ubuntu/ folder there will be a folder NVIDIA-INSTALLER containing the release. Go to this directory and extract it.

sudo -i
tar xvjf Tegra124_Linux_R19.3.0_armhf.tbz2

Do the following to change the LDK ROOTFS DIR (not sure what that is, but this works ...)

export LDK_ROOTFS_DIR=/
echo ${LDK_ROOTFS_DIR}

Go to the Linux For Tegra directory and run this script:

cd Linux_for_Tegra
./apply_binaries.sh

Confirm your success (I got all OK's):

sha1sum -c /etc/nv_tegra_release

On sudo reboot my GUI loaded after a slightly longer than normal black screen (for suspense obviously).

1 Answers1