[mythtv-users] Lubuntu 16.04 - Latest NVidia update causes frontend to crash

[Stephen Worthington]

On Fri, 4 Nov 2016 22:54:04 +0000, you wrote:

>On 04/11/16 21:34, Gary Buhrmaster wrote:
>> On Fri, Nov 4, 2016 at 6:20 PM, George Bingham <georgeb1962 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> .....
>>> But if it's either a bug in the new driver
>>
>> For the legacy drivers nvidia tends to introduce as few
>> changes as possible.  But bugs happen.  And while
>> there have been some other reports regarding the
>> new driver having issues with glx applications, in
>> all cases of crashes it is often better to directly report
>> the issues with new drivers on the nvidia support forums
>> so that the nvidia engineers are aware that the changes
>> broke at least one application as soon as possible.
>>
>Well, yes, but it is probably better to confirm with other users that it /is/ an actual bug rather 
>than operator error before embarrassing yourself on the support forums :)

It does seem to be a bug in the nvidia-304.132-0ubuntu0.16.04.2
driver.  Whether it is a bug in the Nvidia 304.132 driver, or the
Ubuntu 0ubuntu0.16.04.2 patch, is another matter.  I have now tested
on my test PC, which was running Nvidia-340.96 drivers and is a Ubuntu
box, rather than Mythbuntu.  When I updated to
Nvidia-340.98-0ubuntu0.16.04.1, mythfrontend still worked fine.  Then
I tried changing to nvidia-304, which installed the
nvidia-304.132-0ubuntu0.16.04.2 driver, and found that I was unable to
login to the desktop as it kept crashing and going back to the login
prompt again.  So I was unable to try mythfrontend with that driver,
but I expect it would also have crashed.  I downgraded the driver to
nvidia-304.131 and then both the desktop login and mythfrontend were
fine.

So what I am intending to do is to change to Nvidia-340 on my main
MythTV box (Mythbuntu 16.04).  Since I have an Nvidia 220 card on that
box, like the test PC it should be fine with the 340 drivers.  My
mother's MythTV box uses an on-motherboard Nvidia 8200 chip, but that
also seems to be supported by the Nvidia-340 drivers, so I will try
changing it to use them too.  I expect that the only reason these
boxes were still using the 304 drivers was that they have been
successively upgraded for many years and the upgrade process has not
had any code to check if the Nvidia drivers should have been upgraded
as well.  The 340 version is officially a legacy version, as is 304,
but 340 seems to have Ubuntu support (the GUI install page lists it as
"tested", where the 304 version does not).  So I think that anyone who
us using 304 should upgrade to 340 if they can.

George: I checked the
/usr/share/doc/nvidia-340/html/supportedchips.html file installed by
the nvidia-340 package, and the Quadro NVS 285 is listed there but
only in the section where it says what is supported by the 304 driver.
So it looks like moving to the 340 driver is not possible for you.