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Upgraded 14.10 to 15.04, desktop fails to load past login screen. I type in my password, hear a failure sound byte, back to login screen. Also can't boot off a 15.04 thumb drive created with another PC. Guest account does same thing. Tried removing all nvidia driver packages, tried messing with .Xauthority, tried using gdm instead of lightdm (failed even worse: no login screen at all). Tried reinstalling ubuntu-desktop. Get error code of ACPI PCC probe failed, starting 219 or something like that.

Currently running 15.04 off said thumb drive...on an another PC with AMD integrated graphics, no issues.

15.04 doesn't like Nvidia graphics cards. Please help!

Dustin French
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12 Answers12

17

it's you from the future. Here's how I fixed it: I didn't! I re-downloaded the 15.04 image from the Ubuntu website and created a startup "disk" on a USB thumb drive. Today it worked, wehereas it didn't last night :( Perhaps Canonical fixed their image... So I booted from the thumb drive and removed my existing 15.04 and installed a fresh copy! Sure I lost all of my files (VirtualBox, all installed games, etc.) but now Linux works again. Let this be a lesson to you Dustin! Never try and upgrade an Ubuntu OS! Just backup all of your files and do a clean install... just like you used to have to do with Windows!

Dustin French
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12

I had the exact same problem. I'm not sure exactly why it happened, but it seems my kernel was not updated.

To solve that I used Ctrl+Alt+F1 to go to a text-based virtual console, logged on there, then ran:

sudo apt-get install linux-generic

Everything started working again.

Uther
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9

My fix for my laptop

Dell xps l502x, so it is Intel + Nvidia optimus graphic card.

Have a look at what you have

dkms status

You may get something like this

bbswitch, 0.7, 3.19.0-15-generic, x86_64: installed
nvidia-340, 340.76, 3.19.0-15-generic, x86_64: installed

Remove all Nvidia drivers, make Ubuntu back to “clean” state.

Have a look at this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/144871/remove-all-nvidia-files

Basically, you do:

sudo apt-get purge $(dpkg -l | awk '$2~/nvidia/ {print $2}')

This should remove all nvidia drivers and now you should be clean.

You may want to double check: 

dkms status

Install Nvidia driver

Have a look at this: http://www.binarytides.com/install-nvidia-drivers-ubuntu-14-04/ (the command line part)

I tried to install nvidia-349, it didn’t work, then I remember previously I used nvidia-340. It seems important to remember what works for you. I do:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-340 #(you may want to try nvidia-346)

Look at this long guide

http://rajat-osgyan.blogspot.com.au/2015/03/how-to-install-bumblebee-on-ubuntu.html

On step 4, instead of 

sudo echo ON > cat/proc/acpi/bbswitch

I changed it to 

sudo tee /proc/acpi/bbswitch <<<ON

based on https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/bbswitch

Sometimes after turn on bbswitch, reboot, when I do echo /proc/acpi/bbswitch, I still see it OFF. Make sure Nvidia is installed in the first place or reboot for couple of times. If it is OFF, follow the guide to next step.

Reboot

After the guide, reboot, see if you still have the login loop issue. If you still have issues ,then look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log

/var/log/Xorg.0.log

Look for the error messages, which are indicated by (EE). In my case, it says 

Failed to load /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xorg/extra-modules/libglx.so: libnvidia-tls.so.340.46: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I do a locate libglx.so, it seems the file is sitting in another locations. It is time to rebuild xorg.conf

Rebuild xorg.conf

Have a look at this guide: https://lkubuntu.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/quick-and-easy-way-to-fix-x11-issues/

This was my last step and I was able to boot to the GUI.

Community
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kenpeter
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6

I had exactly the same issue on Ubuntu 15.10. None of the solutions suggested here worked, nor did other tutorials. After several clean installs of the system I finally figure out what caused it.

DO NOT PUT nomodeset permanently in the boot parameters!

After a clean install I could not login without manually typing nomodeset in the grub boot options before booting. After the first login, however, I used to set it in the boot config file so that I won't have to type it every time. After one of the re-installs I forgot to do that and this time NVIDIA drivers installed without issue and I was able to login just fine.

Ven
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2

I couldn't install the package

sudo apt-get install linux-kernel-generic

but this solved the problem with the login-loop for me:

sudo apt-get install linux-generic

thx for the idea with the kernel

muru
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Sebastian Wittka
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1

IMHO Optimus is Evil.

Ubuntu 14.10 gifted me a few grey hairs because of Nvidia, then I switched to Win 8. Yesterday I felt like I'm missing something with Win 10 and downloaded 15.04. First run after install and black screen with continuous failure sound. Ctrl + Alt + F1 didnt display the console. Reinstalled 2 times before i remembered 14.10 problem with Optimus. Solved the problem only with Bumblebee.

Community
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Konstantin
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1

Slightly off-topic, but if you have AMD instead of nVidia: After updating 14.04 to 14.10 and then 15.04 I got caught in the login loop. After much poking around at problems with nVidia drivers, they were not much help. I have an HP Pavillion with AMD CPU & Drivers. Here were the simple steps that worked:

Press ctrl-alt-F1 to get a console prompt (non-gui).

dkms status # shows that fglrx-core was installed
sudo apt-get purge fglrx-core
sudo apt-get install fglrx-updates
dkms status
sudo reboot now

Then all was well.

doublemarked
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sailnfool
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1

I had a similar prob but a secondary account could log in so i knew my system wasn't borked. Here's how I fixed it. I went to the home folder of the offending account and trashed all the hidden config folders and files that pertained to gnome, gtk etc. or anything I didn't know I wanted to keep (like Browser settings, music, etc.). Reboot. I had to re-set some system preferences and rearrange desktop icons, but much preferable to a whole install with adding repositories and extra packages. Give it a go before blowing it away and fresh installing.

Stuart Conner
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1

This link worked like a charm for me - https://www.benburwell.com/posts/getting-login-to-work-ubuntu-15.04-nvidia/.

It guided me to the logs where it shows the GLX module was failing to load, and instructed to reinstall the nvidia drivers.

I did one better by going to http://www.geforce.com/drivers and finding my latest linux 64-bit driver, and using the urls in there instead.

Robert Persaud
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1

For me, I just forced a reconfig of the graphic server by deleting the .Xauthority file in a tty in the home folder:

sudo mv .Xauthority .Xauthority_old
Psddp
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0

I had done a clean install of 15.10 but found that lightdm login screen displayed incomplete words (pa rd) and also got in a loop when I logged in. Ctrl-Alt-F1 logged me in fine and I then issued a command sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-*. This listed a load of nvidia drivers and said none were installed. So I decided to install the latest as an experiment. sudo apt-get install nvidia-352 did the trick. After completion there were no incomplete words displayed at the lightdm login screen and I subsequently logged in with no problems. So my fix was to install an nvidia screen driver...preferably the latest. Cheers

Dig
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0

Take a look at your /home partition with df command if it is not full. That can cause the reboot of x-server...

Philippe Gachoud
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