Ubuntu 15.10 GPU swap and 16.04 upgrade gone awry

[Mr. Universe]

I've foolishly been using 15.10 still and my Nvidia GTX 680 just kicked the bucket. I had a GTX 960 on hand but it seemed the Nvidia drivers for that card weren't available through the graphics drivers PPA for 15.10 so I decided to upgrade. After a long fought process involving mangling and then removing my sources.list I finally got it to upgrade to 16.04.2. Now it will not start an Xorg environment. I have been trying everything I can find to get this fixed and I'm at an end. Nothing has worked so far. The TTYs are locked up most of the time but I have been able to use SSH to login. Here are some of the things I have tried:

Start state, Nvidia drivers installed, using lightdm, gdm purged after installing ubuntu-gnome-desktop:

System freezes on TTY7 and does not respond to anything other than SysRq commands. There is a log entry on screen from fsck about my SSD that I am very sure is unrelated.


Reinstalling the Nvidia drivers:

sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
sudo apt-get install nvidia-375 #Also tried nvidia-current

No changes noticeable.


Update alternatives:

$ sudo update-alternatives --config x86_64-linux-gnu_gl_conf
Selection Path Priority Status
------------------------------------------------------------
0 /usr/lib/nvidia-304/ld.so.conf 9701 auto mode
1 /usr/lib/nvidia-304/ld.so.conf 9701 manual mode
* 2 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mesa/ld.so.conf 500 manual mode

#I then set it to option 1 but it get changed back to 2 after every reboot

No changes noticeable.


Reinstalling desktop components:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install --reinstall unity
sudo apt-get install --reinstall xorg

No changes noticeable.


Remove nvidia:

sudo apt-get purge nvidia*

No changes noticeable. I then reinstalled it again.


Install gdm:

sudo apt-get install gdm

Upon restart, it drops to TTY1 and there is screen flicker and the keyboard misses some presses. After waiting a while it stops flickering and can be used as normal. startx does not work.


$ startx

I get the following output:
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/4pwxw4OswnzLOx3j1w0nzyHke-D0D4e2P_5SJ503JyYZDV-z7YTpSNoOOaGH5iC6ryNwq7OurIOjRB7MDBmFRb2FiK6iXgPUz xswMJyKZkGi26-l5hYqrYGfyzcKNGPEK_06Bu7B4Ts_Zym83R2c3SiGKwo2dDoM5 io05BoKyihZnQ1fSgkFXNbGrrFF3j25pcsLsSQtG5LGTeL7LHc 6T7IyQHV1k5quUApfinPy2HBRrEP1hepq1IpYL78WRy8NkGRTF Tw0HRSKdxwGaClsyi9Oz-iOOvZFDEfXQwcVXzvhmne_Cc3L7opiaAYpwKHsXT55ywpjxKHK nm8Q1e5IPX4WyMDz_c4WarrM8oN6Iq2-geo4qunXu6gcB7prf9f7y_-1r05Bj5JlyPnk2WYUQMEDLCv0VEOCfIBSjst0VGO9KF0lcysRR n4XhdsGMZpvxSGVOVdFhbV6RQm4vN_XshcHOUHU5B-dqid-GI8pDA2cnNM1dmZfCZIFqULWAagMxOdE6JFfi4T-ssZYugEkhm_iuj_XcnKpHfdvOs8KnOeeypvt4IRDCNJDhvvib2 TZJWNeWuOZsS4xpqn8EZcWEX-E37g0lvdkDXZ2QbZSm7DcNp5unM-Iop9m0cUxEljcJ5YHg070A0p0ZLmNJvpvfodISIH-Nqyi1Ef6ynB0lw=w1980-h1484-no




The current state is gdm is installed, nvidia-375 is installed, I can get to the screen in the picture, I cannot get the display manager to start.
Here is the last kern.log (https://paste.ubuntu.com/24415399/)and Xorg.0.log
(https://paste.ubuntu.com/24415394/)
Here is the output of `ls -R /usr/lib/xorg`

/usr/lib/xorg/:
modules protocol.txt Xorg Xorg.wrap

/usr/lib/xorg/modules:
drivers extensions input libexa.so libfbdevhw.so libfb.so libglamoregl.so libint10.so libshadowfb.so libshadow.so libvbe.so libvgahw.so libwfb.so

/usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers:
amdgpu_drv.so cirrus_alpine.so cirrus_laguna.so intel_drv.so mga_drv.so neomagic_drv.so openchrome_drv.so r128_drv.so savage_drv.so sisusb_drv.so trident_drv.so vmware_drv.so
ati_drv.so cirrus_drv.so fbdev_drv.so mach64_drv.so modesetting_drv.so nouveau_drv.so qxl_drv.so radeon_drv.so siliconmotion_drv.so tdfx_drv.so vesa_drv.so

/usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions:
libglx.so

/usr/lib/xorg/modules/input:
evdev_drv.so synaptics_drv.so vmmouse_drv.so wacom_drv.so


Is there anymore information I can give for diagnosis? What would be the best next step?

[Autodave]

I am hoping someone will have a better anser than I do, but for what its worth......

The GTX 960 should work fine with the newest Nvidia driver. I would install this from the repositories o0nly!

Now, for the big problem. I personally have had almost no luck at all upgrading to a new OS release. Last time I tried, out of about 13 computers, one worked with no probs, 2 kinda worked but had probs that needed rectified, and the rest just plain crashed. I have learned to back up everything and wipe the old install with the new install. Then, recopy the important things back.

[Mr. Universe]

I am hoping someone will have a better anser than I do, but for what its worth......

The GTX 960 should work fine with the newest Nvidia driver. I would install this from the repositories o0nly!

I usually only use the repos for the GPU drivers. But I did get a bit desperate on this one and tried to install using the run file from nvidia's site with no luck.


Now, for the big problem. I personally have had almost no luck at all upgrading to a new OS release. Last time I tried, out of about 13 computers, one worked with no probs, 2 kinda worked but had probs that needed rectified, and the rest just plain crashed. I have learned to back up everything and wipe the old install with the new install. Then, recopy the important things back.

That's basically been my experience with upgrades in the past as well. I once got a system to do 3 consecutive upgrades(around 12.04) and it felt like a miracle. I'm just hoping I can some how recover this install. I have a lot PITA vendor software setup that takes good wishes and fair dust to get a successful install. I've never been able to migrate it in the past. For systems that don't have those programs on it I always put a fresh install on when I upgrade.