Mageia forum

I installed mageia 4.1 via the LiveCD and it works OK on my (older) Vaio laptop (Nvidia) until I update it. As soon as new kernels go on the video stops working and no amount of use of XFdrake fixes it. It says there's the propriatory driver and asks if I want to use it (yes) but after installation it kills X such that it is no longer usable. I once made the awful mistake of trying to use noveau instead until I could get nvidia working but that rendered the screen unusable as most windows didn't "paint" except as brief vague outlines of windows. The taskbar was invisible too so I was stuck. I just now tried reinstalling from scratch and, again, it works (with nvidia driver) initially but as soon as I make the mistake of updating the system, I lose X.

Part of the problem is I am unable to make any sense of the MANY kernels. There's desktop kernels and desktop586 kernels that appear to be identical and redundant. I try to install a dkms-nvidia (or virtualbox) and the system insists on also installing 3 or 4 other kernels to meet dependencies! WTF?

For one, the graphics driver update does not kill X in the running system, never happened here in the last 8 years. You mean X does not start on next boot after the update?

For the kernels, it does not install 3 or 4 other kernels, it installs kernel modules. E.g. for the nvidia driver, there's a dkms package. This will compile
a new version of the kernel module itself the first time a new kernel is installed. It needs the appropriate kernel-headers and kernel-devel packages installed.
This approach is not feasible e.g. for Mageia live media, you cannot compile a kernel module each time it boots.
Therefore there are precompiled kernel modules for e.g. nvidia driver, there's nvidia-current-kernel-kernelversion, and also a so-called meta-package called
nvidia-current-kernel-desktop-latest which, once installed will care about always requiring the latest nvidia kernel module package.

The same principle for virtualbox.

For your overall issue, maybe you're hit by this: viewtopic.php?f=23&t=8863