12.04 update problem - software re "hardware" update

[Nils Kassube]

rikona wrote:
> Another restart, and it said it had to run in low graphics mode,
> whatever that is, and I said okay. At this point, the CLI came up. I
> tried starx, which failed miserably with many messages rapidly going
> by, some complaining about video, and comments such as "no such file".
> A reboot gave me the same thing again.
> 
> So here I am at the CLI with no idea how to restore the functionality
> I had previously. Since this was supposedly just a simple software
> update, I did not do a system backup before hand - big mistake! What
> do I need to do to figure out what the problem is and fix it?

I'm using 14.04 myself, so I have to write from memory and therefore it 
may not be too helpful. 12.04 has HWE packages for the kernel and also 
for the xserver. It looks like all of them have been installed. At least 
the previous kernel should still be available at the grub menu, but it 
doesn't look like a kernel problem but rather like a video problem.

When I still was running 12.04, I had the HWE kernel in use, which 
didn't make any trouble. Instead it helped to use some USB devices which 
weren't supported by the standard kernel. I also tried the xserver but 
that didn't work on my machine. I don't remember the exact symptoms  
(maybe similar to yours), but I returned to the standard version and 
things were fine again.

So I think you should check which xserver packages are installed and 
possibly replace them with the standard version. You could use the 
command

dpkg --get-selections|grep xorg

to find out which packages are installed. The output looks like this on 
my 14.04 machine which obviously only has standard packages - so these 
are the packages you do want to use:

xorg                                            install
xorg-docs-core                                  install
xorg-sgml-doctools                              install
xserver-xorg                                    install
xserver-xorg-core                               install
xserver-xorg-input-evdev                        install
xserver-xorg-input-mouse                        install
xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse                      install
xserver-xorg-input-wacom                        install
xserver-xorg-video-fbdev                        install
xserver-xorg-video-intel                        install
xserver-xorg-video-modesetting                  install
xserver-xorg-video-nouveau                      install
xserver-xorg-video-vesa                         install

And yes, I suppose the list is much longer for you because I have 
removed a lot of drivers for hardware I don't have. But these package 
names should be the same for 12.04.


Nils