I updated the NVIDIA drivers, now the login screen is black

English Hardware
1

As an action to the notice “updates available” I recently updated the NVIDIA drivers, but since then the login screen (GUI) is all dark. Don’t see no mouse pointer, nothing.
I can jump to console mode (Ctrl-Alt-F2) and login there as usual, and if I then jump back to GUI (Ctrl-Alt-F7) I have a mouse pointer (a diagonal cross), but the screen is still dark. I think X is running fine (trying “startx” ends in error and ps shows one X is already there), but it’s just dark.

There are no errors (EE) in the Xorg log file (Xorg.0.log). Some warnings (WW, though, but I do not think they’re anything serious.
The boot.log is also all OK ].

When I updated to Leap 42.1 last spring I had some trouble with the Plasma screen, but I got that fixed and the system has been working fine for months. I have updated the drivers every time a new version has been available and that has been okay until now.
The adapter is a GeForce 7300 LE and the drivers installed are:

nvidia-computeG02 304.132-38.1
nvidia-gfxG02-kmp-default 304.132-37.1
x11-video-nvidiaG02 304.132-38.1

and also
xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.11-7.2
xf86-video-nv 2.1.20-11.1

I’d like to try to downgrade the drivers to the previous, as they worked fine, but seems NVIDIA only provides the newest.

Can anyone help? I’m definitely no expert, so I really do not know where to go from here.

Hank

2

If you followed the defaults during install, you should have a btrfs filesystem on your “/” and be able to move back to a snapshot before the updates.

3

Hmmm, that’s a feature I didn’t know about.

I also found all old drivers on NVIDIAs support page, but that’s an executable file and I don’t know if running that can mess up the package manager.
Reverting to the previous configuration sounds therefore much better. I’ll give that a try first.

Thanks for the advice!

4

Thanks once more, Knurpht, for pointing me in the right direction! It was very quick and easy to undo the driver update and the system is now up and running again.
To my shame I have to admit, that I wasn’t aware of the snapshots with btrfs. Luckily I decided to change the size of one partition when i moved from 13.2 and therefore did a fresh install. Otherwise I might have just continued with the old filesystem.