Gtk-CRITICAL fails, login loop

[Crossbow]

No, I was not able to open a terminal on the Guest desktop. The only thing I can access is the root through grub. Whatever I do has to be done that way.

The easy way is to boot a live CD, mount your hard disk from there and copy your files onto external media or another partition, unmount the disk, then reinstall as normal.

Can you break that down for me more please? How do I mount my hard disk after I boot up with the live CD?

[Crossbow]

OK, I did a bunch of sh*t and now I can at least open a terminal in Guest and then log in as myself. I went in there and re-installed nvidia-current. I thought then maybe I could get to a GUI, but startx just brought up a blank black screen, first with a cursor, then nothing. CTRL+ALT=f1 back to terminal gave me a repeating:

NO PROTOCOL SPECIFIED
...

That repeated for several hundred lines, then

xinit giving up
xinit unable to connect to xserver

and later,

xinit: server error
xauth:  timout in locking authority file /home/anna/.Xauthority

I tried removing .Xauthority because that's what everyone always says to do. Updated and tried startx again. Black screen again. Back in terminal, it appears to be stuck on

Loading extension for GLX

What's that?

ETA: Progress, I think! I did these steps to clean it up, and then I was able to log in normally but got an error that there were no settings for my monitor, or words to that effect. Purging Nvidia... again.

ETA: OK. I'm up and running. I have huge distorted graphics but it's working. Going to work on backing up my files in case I have to reinstall but I REALLY don't want to! Please tell me what to run to see what the deal is.

[Crossbow]

So, it looks like I now have something called Vesa instead of Nvidia, and it does not have an option for the correct resolution for my screen, which I believe is 1440x900. Apparently Vesa doesn't support this at all. I have no idea what I need to install now, as clearly NVIDIA isn't cutting it. PLEASE HELP!

My driver is, apparently, Vesa:g86 Board-p413h01.

[MG&TL]

No, I was not able to open a terminal on the Guest desktop. The only thing I can access is the root through grub. Whatever I do has to be done that way.

Did you try Ctrl + Alt + T? That usually works, even if the hardware-accelerated parts of the desktop fail to load. By the looks of the rest of your posts though, this is irrelevant now.

OK, I did a bunch of sh*t and now I can at least open a terminal in Guest and then log in as myself. I went in there and re-installed nvidia-current. I thought then maybe I could get to a GUI, but startx just brought up a blank black screen, first with a cursor, then nothing. CTRL+ALT=f1 back to terminal gave me a repeating:

NO PROTOCOL SPECIFIED
...

That repeated for several hundred lines, then

xinit giving up
xinit unable to connect to xserver

and later,

xinit: server error
xauth:  timout in locking authority file /home/anna/.Xauthority

The X server is not an area I know a lot about (I just don't like it: it's ancient and broken in several ways. Its two (competing) replacements, Wayland and Mir, both fix many of X's problems); but from this it appears that the X server started, but did not finish loading for some reason (likely driver issues).

I tried removing .Xauthority because that's what everyone always says to do. Updated and tried startx again. Black screen again. Back in terminal, it appears to be stuck on

Loading extension for GLX

What's that?

GLX is the X server extension that allows for hardware acceleration of applications via OpenGL in the X server (OpenGL for X -> GL-for-X -> GL-X -> GLX, is my guess). If your driver is broken in some way, the X server will hang while it tries to load the extension. I have no idea why it's doing this, but likely your nvidia driver is/was broken.

ETA: Progress, I think! I did these steps to clean it up, and then I was able to log in normally but got an error that there were no settings for my monitor, or words to that effect. Purging Nvidia... again.

ETA: OK. I'm up and running. I have huge distorted graphics but it's working. Going to work on backing up my files in case I have to reinstall but I REALLY don't want to! Please tell me what to run to see what the deal is.

Right, it looks like you have succeeded in getting rid of the broken Nvidia driver. My understanding is if no driver is loaded, the system loads the default driver, which is Vesa. Vesa isn't designed for any particular graphics cards, so it's horrible to use, but it does work reliably.

So, it looks like I now have something called Vesa instead of Nvidia, and it does not have an option for the correct resolution for my screen, which I believe is 1440x900. Apparently Vesa doesn't support this at all. I have no idea what I need to install now, as clearly NVIDIA isn't cutting it. PLEASE HELP!

My driver is, apparently, Vesa:g86 Board-p413h01.

If you have the desktop environment 'working', run the 'software sources' application and click on the 'Additional Drivers' tab. Here you'll see several options. For now, I'd recommend installing the nouveau driver - this is the community driver for Nvidia cards, but in my experience it's a lot more reliable than the Nvidia-made drivers. It gives reasonable performance, but nothing special.

As for the CD rescue option: once you've booted the CD, start up the file manager. You'll see your drives down the left-hand side (from memory), and you should be able to click on them and browse for your files. They're under /home/<your name> in the file layout. Sorry about using the word 'mounting': this is what the file manager does internally when you browse a disk that isn't the one the operating system is running on.

HTH.

[Crossbow]

OK, thanks. Say, I just noticed during boot up that "Nvidia persistence daemon" failed. Do I need to do something about that?

Edit: Oh, NOW what? I hadn't even got to changing anything, but now the GUI won't load again, and it's hanging on "(EE) module ABI major version (6) doesn't match the servre's version (7)". What, do pixies come in and mess with this thing while I'm asleep?

[MG&TL]

OK, thanks. Say, I just noticed during boot up that "Nvidia persistence daemon" failed. Do I need to do something about that?

Edit: Oh, NOW what? I hadn't even got to changing anything, but now the GUI won't load again, and it's hanging on "module ABI major version (6) doesn't match the serve's version (7)". What, do pixies come in and mess with this thing while I'm asleep?

Ugh... apparently the nvidia-persistenced software:

Loads the NVIDIA kernel driver and creates device files
nvidia-persistenced is a simple setuid root utility which loads the NVIDIA kenel
module and creates the NVIDIA device files, to allow usage of the NVIDIA
driver by client applications that would otherwise not have sufficient
permission to load the module or create the device files on their own.

I imagine that is a bad idea when you have another graphics driver working. No idea how to get rid of it though, it should be part of the nvidia driver package which should have been removed. Can you run:

dpkg --get-selections | grep -i nvidia

As for the server mismatch... no idea. Absolutely none. Apparently this happens when you have old modules lying around. Can you post relevant output from

grep EE /var/log/Xorg.0.log

[steeldriver]

VESA is the generic fallback driver AFAIK - nothing to worry about (except that it only supports unaccelerated VGA modes)

Several people appear have had issues with a recent upgrade bumping their nvidia proprietary driver up to an incompatible one - if you can get to a GUI interface (even with the VESA driver) then probably the easiest way forward is to go to the 'Additional Drivers' utility and pick a known good driver from there. If you can't get to a GUI desktop but you're on 12.04 then you can use jockey-text from the command line.

[Crossbow]

Ugh... apparently the nvidia-persistenced software:



I imagine that is a bad idea when you have another graphics driver working. No idea how to get rid of it though, it should be part of the nvidia driver package which should have been removed. Can you run:

dpkg --get-selections | grep -i nvidia

As for the server mismatch... no idea. Absolutely none. Apparently this happens when you have old modules lying around. Can you post relevant output from

grep EE /var/log/Xorg.0.log

Neither of those returned anything, but I did do another nvidia-purge last night and there were somehow some remnants of 319 in there even though I'd purged before.

If you can't get to a GUI desktop but you're on 12.04 then you can use jockey-text from the command line.

I can no longer get to a GUI. I'm in 3.10. Can I still do that?

I read that I should reset unity and compiz. I installed dconf-tools but apt-get dconf reset -f /org/compiz/ only gave me an error that it had to be a path or a key and apparently it's not valid either way. Also tried reinstalling compiz and unity. unity --reset did nothing. Setsid unity returns:

Compiz (decor_ warn: requested a pixmap type decoration when compositing isn't available.

Oh, I forgot, I don't know if this matters, but since the last upgrade, my login screen has a "remote login" option that was not there before.

[MG&TL]

Neither of those returned anything, but I did do another nvidia-purge last night and there were somehow some remnants of 319 in there even though I'd purged before.

Nvidia drivers are ridiculously persistent at times.

I can no longer get to a GUI. I'm in 3.10. Can I still do that?

Yes, but you'll need to

sudo apt-get install jockey-common

first, I suspect.

Oh, I forgot, I don't know if this matters, but since the last upgrade, my login screen has a "remote login" option that was not there before.

No, that's a new feature for remote desktop login on recent releases. Nothing to worry about.

[Crossbow]

Well, I still have the GtK errors, but apparently the ACTUAL problem is that my graphics card is dead. I'm not sure if I should mark this "solved" or not.

If anyone needs to know: What I had to do was uninstall and reinstall both xserver-xorg and xserver-xorg-core, which is something I'd never heard of. That makes me able to use the resolution 1024x768. My monitor is actually 1440x900 but good enough I guess.

This morning when I logged in I was back to 600x800 and my "graphics" were "Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe." I have no earthly idea what that is. I found some threads where people had had the same problem but no solutions, or at least none that I could understand. I uninstalled and reinstalled xserver-xorg and xserver-xorg-core again, and that brought back Vesa.