Arch Linux

terrahop

Member

Registered: 2018-10-29

Posts: 2

[SOLVED]No Output to HDMI with MSI GS65

Hi there, long time lurker first time poster so please let me know if I'm doing anything wrong with this post.

I recently got a new laptop, the MSI GS65 8RF and am having issues with the laptop outputting to my second screen connected through the HDMI port.

My system info

lspci | grep VGA output:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 3e9b
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP104M [GeForce GTX 1070 Mobile] (rev a1)

uname -a output:

Linux sin 4.18.16-arch1-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat Oct 20 22:06:45 UTC 2018 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Window Managers tried on arch:
i3 and Gnome

Some things to note:
1 - After days of playing around and testing different configurations, I firmly believe that the HDMI port is somehow hardwired into the graphics card, I tried install to Pop OS! on it over the weekend and it just worked out of the box, my second monitor was detected and worked fine, no extra configuration was needed, I didn't need to blacklist nouveau in kernal parameters nor did I need to add any 'acpi_osi' configurations that have been recommended to be used with modern laptops on some forums. However as soon as I used system76's power tool to switch to Intel graphics(it essentially just blacklists nvidia and nouveau by creating a config file in '/etc/modprobe.d/' ) the HDMI is no longer detected when booting or logging in which leads me to believe that the graphics card has to be turned on and used by the system in order to output through the HDMI(perhaps to support Gsync monitors? I can't think of any other reason why this would be happening).

2 - After playing around a lot with the Xorg.conf file I somehow managed to get both my login manager and Gnome/i3 to run on my second screen BUT only that screen, my laptop screen just went blank with an underline in the top left corner. With a different Xorg.conf configuration I was able to get my laptop screen to work with gdm and i3 and my HDMI connected screen to also output video however my HDMI connected screen was just a blank black screen and if I moved my mouse over to it the cursor would just become a black cross, running xrandr and arandr to view my screen configuration when this happened showed that HDMI was still disconnected though, I unfortunately have changed my Xorg.conf too much and cannot remember what I did to be able to replicate that.

3 - Sometimes when booting with the HDMI screen plugged in and switching to another tty terminal, '@' symbols would be written to the terminal which makes it essentially impossible to login to another tty as when I'm inputting my password, '@' symbols would be written to it causing the login to fail with invalid password, these @ symbols would also output to Vim's input terminal, I need to either unplug the screen for this to go away or restart the laptop without the screen plugged in.

4 - My previous laptop( MSI GS60 2QD ) worked absolutely fine on arch, graphics card worked, HDMI worked, and I didn't need to add any boot parameter workarounds to be able to switch the the dGPU off using acpi_call.

Bear in mind this laptop works fine in Pop Os, would it be because of Ubuntu? or maybe system76 do some special stuff with their Pop OS that just makes it work? I just don't like ubuntu so here I am haha. I have also tried this with the LTS kernel with no luck. I have tried installing arch manually, with Antergos and with anarchy Linux and had no luck with any of them with regard to the HDMI output.

Any help would be appreciated. I'm at my wits end here after the time I've spent trying to fix this for the last week

Last edited by terrahop (2018-10-30 00:19:00)

terrahop

Member

Registered: 2018-10-29

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED]No Output to HDMI with MSI GS65

Update

I somehow seemed to have finally fixed the issue by removing my Xorg.conf file and uninstalling xorg-xinit and my second screen is now detected and working, unfortunately this means I can't use startx to run i3 from a tty so have resorted to just sticking with GDM as a login manager(don't like graphical managers).