Grrr, that was nasty. I upgraded my Ubuntu to 11.10 after the 11.04 installation on my Lenovo laptop did not boot anymore with the latest kernel update. I usually install all updates that Ubuntu’s Update Manager proposes and never had problems so far. Until yesterday when the last kernel update was received.
The laptop did not boot anymore. It halted somewhere without any further notice. Switching to the console with Ctrl-Alt-F1 and checking the X11 log at /var/log/Xorg.0.log revealed that NVIDIA graphics driver could not be loaded anymore. Re-installing the driver did not fix the problem :(. Well, at least I could boot the old kernel and check systems out.
However, I wasn’t able to make the newest kernel working with NVIDIA’s kernel module. So I finally tried the distribution upgrade to 11.10. But again, the system stuck in the boot. Even worse, I had a new symptom:
Unable to connect to the system bus: Failed to connect to socket /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket: Connection refused
An internet research turned up this excellent forum thread which told me that the distribution upgrade had failed to migrate two directories. Following the instructions of #24 – using mv command and setting chmod 1777 /run/lock did finally help me to repair the system.
So guys, if you observe the weird behaviour after upgrading a kernel on an NVIDIA based computer, check out:
- The X11 log for messages about your kernel module
- Wiki page http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Grafikkarten/NVIDIA/nvidia
- Wiki page http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Grafikkarten/Nvidia
- and of course, google your boot log error