Black screen booting on Kubuntu 8.10 Beta Live CD

[Fif59]

I got a black screen booting on the Kubuntu 8.10 Beta Live CD.
My graphical card is an ATI HD Radeon 3850.

I checked the ISO file and the CD; everything is ok.

[Felipe Venegas (fvenegas)]

Thanks for your bug report and for your contribution to ubuntu. In order to determine if this issue is usplash related, would you boot your computer with usplash disabled and then shutdown to see if you can reproduce the issue? To disable usplash for a single boot, you can follow these steps :

1.Press Esc during Grub boot delay to access the boot menu.
2.Select your actual Ubuntu boot line and press "e" to edit it.
3.Select the "kernel" line and press "e" to edit it.
4.At the end of the line, remove "splash" and "quiet" and press "enter".
5.Type "b" to boot the custom boot line.

[Imitation (lisho)]

I did remove the 'usplash quiet' options from my boot on a Kubuntu 8.10 Beta LiveDVD.

The boot process goes all the way through to loading X where upon you get a black screen.

I tried Ctrl-Alt-F12 and Ctrl-Alt-BckSpc.. kind of just button mashing because I'm pretty impatient and that's what I do :)
After probably 10 or 15 seconds I came to a bash prompt. I tried StartX but got a reply saying that the X Server was already active.

I am running an ATI Radeon 3870.

[Alex Busquets (alexbusquets)]

I have the same problem with ubuntu 8.10 release candidate. With another previus beta happened the same. I start the live cd and it starts normally, even I can hear the sound when the desktop is loaded in the speakers, but the screen is blank. My graphics card is ATI 3850, and the rest of the components are: ASUS P5Q PRO, INTEL CORE 2 DUO E8400, 2 GB RAM KINGSTON HYPERX 1066...

I hope you can find a solution, I have changed my computer and now I can't use UBUNTU!

Thanks

[Fif59 (pdezac-linux)]

I confirm, removing the 'usplash quiet', did not solve the problem., existing also in Kubuntu 8.10 RC.

[ThorbjørnTux (martsummsw)]

Another confirm - it is in the final Kubuntu 8.10

It seems to be the start of the xserver. I get a sound when KDE starts - but my screen remains black.
I can get a console and see that KDE4 is running ....

I have an ATI 3870. This problem seems related to 3870.

[ThorbjørnTux (martsummsw)]

Meant ATI 38xx

[ThorbjørnTux (martsummsw)]

It seems related with
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/277699

And it seem both to be in ubuntu/kubuntu (xorg-problem)

[ThorbjørnTux (martsummsw)]

CTRL+ALT+F1

And
sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf
and adding

Driver "Vesa"
to section "Device"

then PS -A | grep Xorg
and kill it with

sudo kill -9 id-for-xorg

made kde 4 start.

The 'ati' driver is not working.

[ThorbjørnTux (martsummsw)]

I have removed this as a duplicate of 277699

Bug 277699 is talking about compiz, Intel and Radeon 9700
(This is about the kununtu cd not starting KDE with ATI 38xx)

[Alex Busquets (alexbusquets)]

I'm agree wirth you, I think it's not the same bug, but ir also affects ubuntu gnome, not only KDE.

[Alex Busquets (alexbusquets)]

Well, finally I managed to run the Live CD. The solution is quite obvious, but I didn't know about that (I'm a newbie in ubuntu/linux).

On the first screen of the live CD, just after you choose the language you want, then you press F4 and select Safe Graphics Mode. I did this and the desktop loaded perfectly and I also installed the OS. When installed it also goes ok.

I hope this could be useful.

But well, nothing is perfect, now I have an strange problem with my lan card, but this is a matter of another bug.

One last thing, I know there a lot of problems to solve, but I would have appreciated any other message from the ubuntu stuff to give an answer to this problem... It's only a a little reflexion, nothing else, but I think that many other inexperienced users like me can have the same problem if it is related to all ATI 38xx cards.

Meanwhile, I'll continue trying to solve my lan problem...

[ThorbjørnTux (martsummsw)]

Attaching my Xorg.0.log

[ThorbjørnTux (martsummsw)]

Status is set to incomplete - but many has confirmed it.
Is anymore information needed ?

[Kannix (theabbes)]

Same problem after upgrading from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10. Doesn't start anymore with blank screen. I also tried the LiveCD. Starting in normal mode doesn't work either, starting in safe graphics mode works for me.
Radeoln 3850 on nForce4.

[Kannix (theabbes)]

//Update:
Booting LiveCD and installing fglrx-org drivers via chroot worked for me and the system boots w/o problems.

[Jallto (ltg-power)]

i have the same problem too.. i cant start live cd hardy, and intrepid.. with my ati 3850.
so i write this just to confirm that everyone with those cards wont be able to start...Its a bit annoying now..
Im not sure,should i boot in safe mode..install kubuntu 8.10 or 8.04 and work with "vesa" drivers..
Because i really want my gpu to work normally, with nice effects, and to use normal resolution(monitor is also not recognised).

[zamajama (zamajama)]

Here's my story with the ATI HD 3850.

While installing 8.10 right off-the-bat I had to run the installation on the safe graphics mode option otherwise my monitor would show 'black', but in the sense that there was a signal being sent from the graphics card like when a screen saver is about to launch. 8.10 provided the proprietary FGLRX driver v 8.54.3 and it also installed and configured the ATI Catalyst Control Center 2.1. At the time I had my TV plugged in through the S-Video. I shut down and then restarted the next day for which boot up was normal, but right after the Ubuntu splash/load orange bar screen, my monitor went black again and my mouse or keyboard were unresponsive as I tried to do a CTRL-ALT-F1 to get to the terminal - no dice. I had reboot in recovery mode and launch xfix. After that I was able to get to my desktop, but appearance was horrible; my resolution and wallpaper were preserved at 1024x768, but the colors were all distorted as it I were looking at it with thermal imaging (like the Predator). I was still able to make out the menu and sub-menus to notice that the FGLRX drivers were deactivated in Administration>Hardware Drivers. This was expected since I ran the xfix in recovery mode. I re-activated and rebooted and my screen was drawn normally again. I worked on my machine for a while and then shutdown for the day.

The next day, same darn thing happened! I had to redo my steps. The following day, same thing. I went through this process several times and it was really getting annoying, until I decided to unplug my TV - the strange thing is that the Catalyst Center showed my TV as display "1" and my monitor as display "2" - I feel that it should have been the other way around. Anyway, after unplugging my TV, I rebooted and my box was able load itself normally.

The only thing I get now is when watching .avi's on Totem I get the annoying flicker, but when I do fullscreen mode, the flicker is not present. I haven't tried watching DVD's yet.

Compiz effects like the wobbly windows, etc. work fine, but when I do the ALT-TAB to scroll through the open apps, the little screens are blank. I will do some testing on TV-OUT to see what works best.

Is it time to get an Nvdia GeForce 9800? I won't give up on ATI just yet and I don't want to go back to Windows on my machine!!

My setup:
ASUS P5Q Pro
G. Skill 4GB RAM (2x 2GB modules) DDR2 SDRAM
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0 ghz
Samsung 2232BW 22" Widescreen LCD
Corsair 650W PSU

I've uploaded my xorg log representing the successful boot just in case.

[zamajama (zamajama)]

Here is my old xorg when the black screen happened for comparison.

[kernel-janitor (kernel-janitor)]

Hi Fif59,

This bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? Can you try with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO CD images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/karmic .

If it remains an issue, could you run the following command from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal). It will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report.

apport-collect -p linux 279004

Also, if you could test the latest upstream kernel available that would be great. It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please remove the 'needs-upstream-testing' tag. This can be done by clicking on the yellow pencil icon next to the tag located at the bottom of the bug description and deleting the 'needs-upstream-testing' text. Please let us know your results.

Thanks in advance.

[This is an automated message. Apologies if it has reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Alex Busquets (alexbusquets)]

For me the problem was solved with ubuntu 9.04. Now I can start the Live CD without problem either in Normal or Safe graphics mode with my ATI 3850. No problem now.

[Leann Ogasawara (leannogasawara)]

Marking this Fix Released for now based on the previous comment.

Fif59, since you are the original bug reporter, if this is still an issue for you with the latest 9.10 Karmic Alpha release please feel free to reopen this bug by setting the status back to "New" and run the apport-collect command noted above. Thanks.

[WSmart (wsmart)]

I'm having this issue on an HD3850 running an Ubuntu 9.10 liveCD, blank screen. Mouse cursor with rolling circle shows up, then nothing. My 9.10 hard drive install does the same thing. I can get into a terminal if I move quick enough-otherwise the interface freezes.

Booting the liveCD in safe graphics mode does get me to desktop with the liveCD as well.

Thanks ALL!

[WSmart (wsmart)]

For me the problem seems to be a DVI to VGA issue, part of it.

I have an older card with both vga and DVI, and even though I can boot fine though the vga(to a CRT), I have to use the F4 safe graphics if I boot through a DVI to VGA adapter.