Everything was going fine... until it wasn't

[Annwfyn]

Hi!

I'm new to Kubuntu and somewhat new to Linux overall. I haven't been able to find any resources online regarding my issue, and believe me, I have looked. I installed via usb without any issues, started getting everything updated and software installed (Synergy, VPN, etc). No issues at first and then all of a sudden after about 30 minutes the system freezes. Upon reboot I get a handful of error messages before the system fully boots.

DMAR: DRHD: handling fault status reg 3
DMAR: DRHD: [DMA Read NO_PASID] request device [02:00.0] fault addr 0xc0177000 [fault reason 0x0c] non-zero reserved fields in PTE

Then when the reboot finishes I'm able to login but past the login screen the desktop environment is graphically bugged with like a checkerboard pattern. I can access apps and the terminal but trying to actually read anything a nightmare. Attempting to take screenshots has yielded mixed results so I actually took a picture of the display. Some of the those lines are damage to the monitor, ignore that. I tried reinstalling using the same install media, but the same thing happened. Fine for a little bit, then crash and graphical issues on reboot. Then I tried installing regular Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS. That didn't make it through the first crash, immediate graphical issues. So I switched back to Kubuntu but tried using a new USB drive with balena etcher instead of Ventoy. That lasted a bit longer but I've ended up in the same spot. This is my low key media server. My primary machine is my gaming PC which I just switched over the Nobara with no issues.

https://imgur.com/a/rPjPEdq

specs:
CPU: Intel i5 4690k
Motherboard: GA-Z97X-SLI
GPU: GTX 550 Ti
RAM: 8GB DDR3
SSD: WD Blue 250GB M.2 SATA SSD

[kc1di]

I believe the problem may be your GPU card if it's nvidia try installing the correct driver for it. Go to driver manager in the menu see what options it gives you.
Good luck and Welcome to Kubuntu & linux

[Annwfyn]

Thanks for the help! I opened the driver manager and that showed that it wasn't set to use the proprietary Nvidia drivers so I selected that and applied the change. While applying those changes it gave me an error message:

pk-client-error-quark: Error while installing package: installed nvidia-dkms-390 package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 10 (313)

edit: tried installing via command line.
sudo ubuntu-drivers install nvidia:390

got a similar error message and now on reboot I just get a black screen with the cursor in the middle but no login screen.

[whoami]

Annwfyn I'm by no means an expert, but I've been recently finding out that newer versions of Kubuntu find it harder to work with my really old hardware (~10 years and older). Everything that I've been finding online points to kernel problems. This means that no matter which popular distribution you try (K/X/Ubuntu, Manjaro or Fedora, to name a few), it will be the kernel version that's causing problems. I will personally blame regressions in kernel v6.x which are really shameful, because a ton of people try Linux as secondary OS on older, "Windows-obsolete" hardware, and keep Windows for business on newer platforms.
I have a super old Core2 Duo machine that happily runs kernel 6.8 and a newer one that crashes and needs 5.15, so this makes little sense.
There's a chance, if you try installing the latest kernel 5.x (it was the default in 2020) and boot into it, you may see your machine behave better than with kernel 6.x.
Running an older kernel in a LAN-only media server (not exposed to WAN) should not be a huge problem if the os is stable and does not complain about broken dependencies.