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enter image description hereOK, this is a cascade of issues and I don't know what to do anymmore.

  1. My screen was staying black for too long (maybe 10 seconds) after logging in on Ubuntu 18.04 with regular gnome3 desktop. So I decided to check my graphics drivers. I had nvidia 390 drivers and I read online there were some issues with them, so I tried to switch back to the 340 drivers which were apparently available in "additional software".
  2. That didn't work. I rebooted and the display still took a long while to come on. I checked which drivers were in use, and it actually reverted to the Nouveau drivers. Apparently there was a problem with 'installing/selecting' the 340 drivers because some file could not be modified because of permission issues. I thought "hey OK but if it only reverted to Nouveau just now it might boot fine next time" so I rebooted again.
  3. That didn't work either and now the screen just remains black permanently (can't even try to log in). So I try to change TTY to fix this graphical problem.
  4. That doesn't work either, because for some reason after about 3 seconds every time the TTY is automatically switched back to... TTY7 I guess? and for 0.5 seconds the following text is shown (see image) before it blanks again.
  5. As a last resort I would just reinstall the whole OS BUT I can't do that either because I have no USB stick (it broke) and no CD drive. I installed from an ISO on disk which I loaded manually, but I cant do that again because well, the GRUB menu timer is set to 0 seconds. And I can't change that easily because every 3 seconds my TTY changes back to TTY7 which is blank and useless.

Please help, I'm all out of ideas. What can I do? I'd prefer very much to just revert to the nvidia 390 drivers and just accept the long login time. Is there a command for that which doesn't take painstakingly long to type while you constantly have to switch TTYs?

UPDATE: OK, suddenly my TTY stopped switching automatically and I could restore usage of the Nouveau drivers (apparently somehow they weren't really selected after all) using information from this post: How to change proprietary video driver using the command line?. I'm now back at square 1 but at least I can still use my computer.

PDiracDelta
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1 Answers1

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I had to disable hardware acceleration in my xorg.conf to get rid of the black screen issue:

# Add "Option" line shown below to either /etc/X11/xorg.conf
# or /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/foobar.conf

Section "Device"
    Option "NoAccel" "True"
    Driver "nouveau"
    # ...
EndSection
Nimrod
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