A couple of weeks ago, I attended a series of training sessions organized by my company. For these training sessions we are provided with a company laptop. To prevent everyone from having an entirely different system, it is required to use Ubuntu as an OS. So far no problems. Everything works. I have used this laptop for over a year now, both at home and on other trainings.
Now... for the trainings of a couple of weeks ago we were also asked to install some software for the Raspberry Pi Pico. Chapter 2, chapter 3.1 and Appendix A and B from this PDF.
Summarized:
Installed through apt:
cmake
gcc-arm-none-eabi
libnewlib-arm-none-eabi
build-essential
automake
autoconf
build-essential
texinfo
libtool
libftdi-dev
libusb-1.0-0-dev
installed from source:
openocd (picoprobe-mod)
picotool
Nothing tricky to see here. Everything worked without much issues. However... after a reboot I noticed that I was stuck on a black screen with only a non-blinking cursor.
I spent an entire day trying to fix it, but ultimately I found the Nvidia drivers to be the culprit. After removing these, everything worked again.
(I was able to remove them by logging in to the shell directly by pressing CTRL-ALT-Fx (does this have a specific name?))
When arriving at the training, I learned that I was not alone: about half of all laptops had experienced the same or a similar issue. Most of my colleagues simply formatted their system after the training and reinstalled everything. That of course is the easiest solution, but I myself am too stubborn: I want to get to the bottom of this and fix it. Because even though everything works and the laptop is usable, I can no longer adjust the brightness (I tried like 10 different methods), and it appears the battery drains a lot faster.
I tried installing an older version of the Nvidia driver, per a suggestion of another SE post, but to no avail.
Possibly relevant: When I switch to the Fx-shell, and then go back to the GUI (F7), I can still see the previous shell I was on. Only I can no longer type in it. This probably indicates that the screen got stuck somehow.
So... does anyone have any ideas on how I could fix this without having to do a full reinstall?
