Arch Linux

musasabi

Member

From: Chicago, IL

Registered: 2011-06-23

Posts: 63

[SOLVED] Rebooted after install, no display

I went through an abnormal install process (Android wifi tether + ethernet bridged connection in Windows connected to a common switch. But hey; 4G is fast!) to circumvent my company's new restrictions on internet access. Everything seemed to be fine, but when I rebooted after completing the install, I got absolutely nothing displayed after the video drivers loaded. Fortunately I had the presence of mind to enable the ssh service beforehand, so I was able to successfully log in that way to check on things.

[patrick@archdevbox]lspci | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Caicos [Radeon HD 6450]

[patrick@archdevbox]lsmod | grep radeon
radeon		859687	1
ttm		64385	1 radeon
drm_kms_helper	32878	1 radeon
drm		218903	3 ttm,drm_kms_helper,radeon
i2c_algo_bit	5392	1 radeon
i2c_core	20708	5 drm,i2c_i801,drm_kms_helper,i2c_algo_bit,radeon

So when it first boots, I get the grub prompt. I select the Arch install and occassionally I'll see what I assume to be fsck running, but immediately thereafter the screen goes blank (but stays active, as in the monitor is receiving a signal from the video card but the video card wasn't able to render it properly). It stays blank forever, as far as I can tell. Again, I can SSH in so I know the installation worked, the machine booted, etc.

This is slightly weird since the Arch installer booted just fine with its high-res console and all that.

Any help?

Last edited by musasabi (2012-12-27 19:26:06)

Inxsible

Forum Fellow

From: Chicago

Registered: 2008-06-09

Posts: 9,183

Re: [SOLVED] Rebooted after install, no display

what driver package did you install. Try the xf86-video-ati

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musasabi

Member

From: Chicago, IL

Registered: 2011-06-23

Posts: 63

Re: [SOLVED] Rebooted after install, no display

Yeah, I've got xf86-video-ati installed, as well as ati-dri and mesa.

unifiedlinux

Member

Registered: 2012-11-03

Posts: 20

Re: [SOLVED] Rebooted after install, no display

Hello,

it looks like as soon as the radeon driver is loaded (just after the fsck), it detects an incorrect resolution that your monitor is unable to handle, it may be because the graphics card can't detect the EDID from your monitor (and can't get the maximum resolution supported by it), this might be due to a hardware (wiring) problem, check if your video cables are properly connected, reboot and try again. You could also try manually setting the resolution as described here : https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GR … resolution, set it to a resolution that your monitor can handle, then reboot and see if it changes anything.

I don't think that xf86-video-ati, ati-dri and mesa will change anything since the problem has nothing to do with Xorg (the graphical interface).

Have a nice day and good luck.

musasabi

Member

From: Chicago, IL

Registered: 2011-06-23

Posts: 63

Re: [SOLVED] Rebooted after install, no display

Thanks for the suggestions, unifiedlinux. I set the resolution for grub, but to no avail. Also, I know the monitor and GPU are communicating properly because every other graphical interface (be it Arch's installer or the UEFI interface) works properly.

My first bit of troubleshooting this morning running systemctl enable gdm. When I rebooted after having ran that, the whole system worked, acceleration and all. Then I messed with gdm's config files and when I rebooted again was presented with a teal screen but nothing more. It looked like it had begun loading one of the colored stripes of Gnome3's stock background or something. Then I reinstalled gdm and it worked again, until I rebooted again. Then I got the same teal screen.

So next, I switched to fglrx. Everything seemed to work well there, except that fglrx itself couldn't be found (the kernel module, neither by modprobe or by X) so Gnome started in fallback mode.

I reverted to the open source drivers and now upon boot I get a terminal that is off-center (the text seems to begin being written a few inches to the left of the screen) that doesn't react to keyboard input. Oddly, when I rebooted it via SSH, I got the text you would expect upon shutting down from the command prompt.

Waaat.

cfr

Member

From: Cymru

Registered: 2011-11-27

Posts: 7,156

Re: [SOLVED] Rebooted after install, no display

Does passing nomodeset on the kernel command line make any difference?

(I have a similar-ish problem on a machine with ATI graphics. That's not running Arch but I did find nomodeset at least let me boot to a reliably existent display to try to figure stuff out. This is probably less of a concern with ssh enabled, of course. I tend to get "no signal" in that case, though.)

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musasabi

Member

From: Chicago, IL

Registered: 2011-06-23

Posts: 63

Re: [SOLVED] Rebooted after install, no display

cfr (I just typo'd your name cfg... Linux habits. ) - Yeah, I had nomodeset enabled from when I tried to run fglrx.

I solved this today, if not as originally intended. The reason the fglrx module was missing was simply because I hadn't enabled the dkms service (never used it before, either, but it seems to have been installed by default anyway). So I enabled and started the service, uninstalled xf86-video-ati, ati-dri, and libgl (despite the protestations of many packages) and then reinstalled catalyst-dkms and catalyst-utils. The install processes built and installed the module for me so when I ran aticonfig --initial and rebooted, everything went smooth as butter.

So, again, I still wasn't able to get the open source drivers up and running, but ultimately, things came together nicely.