Recent update broke video

[Radly]

I have been running 15.04 for a few weeks, and did a routine update a few days ago. Now my login screen is a useless mess--big black or white regions with random colored specks. I can ssh into the system okay, so I can run command-line actions, and if reinstalling is the only solution, it won't kill me. But I don't want to run into this again. How can I determine exactly what caused this, and how to prevent it from recurring? I don't even know what kind of graphics hardware I have, so some help in finding out that information via command line might be useful. The hardware is a Dell Inspiron 531.

[RobGoss]

Open up your terminal and run this command it will give you your graphic card details.


lspci | grep "VGA"

[Radly]

Thanks. So now I know that I have an NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS, and that "grep -i nvidia /var/log/apt/history.log" returns nothing. Is there something else I should be looking for that relates to the display?

[Vladlenin5000]

Had you previously installed nvidia proprietary drivers? If so - depending on the way you did it - breaking after a kernel update is to be expected.
I won't comment further on the solutions because almost everything depends on your answer...