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Intel hardware - 945GM chipset, using the Intel i915 graphics driver. Dual core 1.7GHz processor, and 1GB of ram.
The install cd boots fine every time - August 2011 release of the minimal install disc.
Once the boot gets to "processing udev events", the display goes blank when switching from the generic startup driver. I can successfully login and reboot without the display, so I know it's just the display.
UN: "root"
pw: <relevant pw>
reboot
Even with only installing the base system and only logging in to reboot, this error persists. Selecting different mirrors for reinstallation did not change anything.
Was running a copy of Windows XP successfully before installing Linux. Lubuntu 11.10 ran on it for a while as well. The old arch install iso was around from when installed on my primary use computer. I initially decided to try out Gentoo with this laptop. Compiling my own kernel had a few hiccups at first, but it's quick enough, and the results work well - that's where I even found which driver runs it well. I got my X server and LXDE up and running smoothly before compiling Chromium.
After an hour of compiling and no end in sight, I gave up. It's old enough hardware that compiling everything sounds like a great way to run it all into the dirt, and Gentoo doesn't offer binaries for nearly as many packages as Arch does. Compiling from the AUR has been deceptively fast - I've only dealt with small, relatively stable & unchanging packages.
Gonna see if this error persists with another install from another distro, to see if it's hardware related. I didn't see any "magic blue smoke" come out anywhere, but the inconsistency with udev isn't vouching for that. May as well field strip it too, to see if anything glaring shows up.
Could the kernel or udev need recompiling to support this graphics driver? Is there any decent way to check on the compile options of a running arch kernel? I remember from compiling it in Gentoo, I could put that info somewhere in the /proc folder in a config file, but I don't see that here. Is it named something different?
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I have had similar problems with i915 on a (newer) hp laptop.
It might help to interrupt the boot process and set a boot option of: i95.modeset=0
There is a wiki page on this site for KMS, Intel which may also be useful.
Once I got beyond this stage, I was never able to get the machine to work with the intel driver under X, so ended up using the vesa driver.
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Issue in the kernel part of the Intel driver. Quite possibly fixed by using the very latest kernel (3.3.4). The LTS kernel (3.0) is also something to try.
@johhnyp: The X driver *needs* KMS, disabling it is *never* a solution. It temporarily gives you a standard text console, but that's it. Having the modeset=0 stuff in the wiki only confuses people.
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@Gusar - your comment prompted me to have another go at getting the Linux driver working on my HP Pavilion dm4 (I gave up in exasperation, earlier).
The symptoms are that the screen is black on bootup. I removed the boot option which set 'i95.modeset=0', rebooted and allowed X to start up. The screen was very dark, but I could just see a glimmer of graphics if I peered closely enough.
I did some googling around, and found that adding the following boot options in menu.lst, did the trick: 'acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor'
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