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I did the upgrade to 15.10 and I boot up into a blank screen. I am able to get to the consoles, tty1, tty2, and etc. I do have a video card; I think it is NVIDIA...

grim
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  • you should do fresh install – Alex Jones Oct 23 '15 at 03:11
  • Just try the available suggestion for 'blank screen' after (major) update. It is likely a video-driver/kernel issue. – david6 Oct 23 '15 at 04:12
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    Are you sure you don't have an AMD graphics card? Find out with lshw -c display. The Wily kernel and the proprietary AMD drivers don't work together yet. – Nephente Oct 23 '15 at 07:12
  • The lshw -c display returns that I am usng NVIDIA, GF114 [GeForce GTX 560 Ti]. I think I have to download a current driver from NVIDIA and somehow install. I don't know how to do this from the command line. Can someone tell me how to do this? – grim Oct 23 '15 at 10:48
  • I have console access so I logged on as root and did "apt-get remove Xorg", reboot, "apt-get install Xorg", reboot. That did not help. – grim Oct 25 '15 at 17:35

8 Answers8

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Tried all the above and also tried upgrading (and downgrading) my nvidia drivers.

In the end what worked was to uninstall nvidia using

sudo apt-get purge nvidia

and remove nvidia files from /etc/modprobe.d/ - these were stopping nouveau from loading I also copied a backup of xorg.conf file to /etc/X11/xorg.conf then rebooting worked.

[edit] In fact this was not a complete solution since it only worked sometimes. In the end I also needed to create a folder /var/lib/lightdm (see https://askubuntu.com/a/692627/451489) and also fix my .Xauthority permissions https://askubuntu.com/a/223634/451489) - now lightdm, X and unity all appear to be working reliably.

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Geraint
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I had the exact same problem. I had to reinstall my desktop (kubuntu) which in turn reinstalled my display manager. One or both fixed the problem for me.

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

Just replace kubuntu-desktop with your desktop of choice and then reboot.

Damien Kemens
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I followed a link to "How to backup settings and list of installed packages" thatwas very helpful. I also made a copy of /etc/passwd. I did that then found after the "clean install" I did not need to restore! The "clean install" left all my packages there (except TrueCrypt disappeared). When I reestablished my link to the home directory on the RAID array, The settings were generally restored. Working well now. Thank you. I was expecting that the "clean install" would format the drive first before installing the OS, but I am pleasantly surprised to find that my expectation was incorrect! I would rather be lucky than right.

grim
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This answer https://askubuntu.com/a/692627/172035 solved it for me:

It is possible that the folder /var/lib/lightdm has not been created.

You could try: mkdir -p /var/lib/lightdm; chown -R lightdm:lightdm /var/lib/lightdm ; chmod 0750 /var/lib/lightdm with root permission if needed.

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Elad
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For me, it turned out that this was caused by the upgrade process not completing properly. This command fixed the issue:

sudo apt-get -f install
hcs42
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I got the same black screen after upgrade from 14.04 LTS to 15.10 . The reason I got the error was due to incomplete upgrades.

  1. To solve it, go to "Advanced options for Ubuntu", then go to previous installed kernel version, e.g. 3.10.58 (recovery mode).
  2. Then choose "normal boot" to go to command line. Login with root credentials
  3. Try the command sudo apt-get -f install . If there was some incomplete command left, it should show up here. For me, I got the message sudo dpkg --configure -a incomplete
  4. Running that command helped, and I am now using Ubuntu 15.10 happily.
CyprUS
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When I had this problem, the culprit was lightdm.

When you are booting up and you get to the black screen, hit CTRL + ALT + F4. You should see a terminal pop up.

There you should type

sudo apt-get purge lightdm

then

sudo apt-get update

next

sudo apt-get install lightdm

finally

dpkg-reconfigure lightdm

Now type sudo shutdown -r now to restart.

TheWoerbler
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  • Why do you use dpkg-reconfigure lightdm? For me it showed the same configuration step that the one from the previous line. – A.L Nov 18 '15 at 10:40
  • @ A.L. It won't hurt. Since u don't know if the user has installed another DM, it means reaasingning LightDm as the DM in use. Just in case of ... - remember: we are not sitting in front of the PC in question - Well and as I remember Kubuntu uses SDDM since a while - past Precise 12.04. – ellisistfroh Nov 20 '15 at 11:34
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had same problem, finaly after 2 hours of bruteforcing removing various user files restarting ..., came to solution went to older kernel that helped to boot plasma then opened drivers section and disabled nvidia driver (using X.Org X.server) restarted to newest kernel and things now ok. hardware: GeForce GT 540M

Vidmantas Norkus
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