Boot to black screen

[wanyal]

Re: Boot to black screen

The update hasnt fixed the issue, however, i found a solution on the Ubuntu Forums.

It tells me that i need to edit /etc/gdm.conf and set GdmXserverTimeout=30.

How would i do this using the root shell in recovery mode?

[dibl]

Re: Boot to black screen

That's not going to help Kubuntu -- you're running KDM, not GDM. There's not a /etc/kdm.conf file, so I'm not sure what the equivalent setting would be for KDE.

[flarson]

Re: Boot to black screen

Kubuntu uses KDM instead of GDM so that is not directly applicable. I am not real familiar with gdm but that sounds like a setting to tell the Xserver to quit trying after some period of time and put you back at the linux terminal. I am pretty sure Kubuntu does this by default which makes me think that KDM thinks it has started successfully.

I think you should look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log and see if it claims to have started or tells you why it stopped.

[wanyal]

Re: Boot to black screen

How would i check this?

[flarson]

Re: Boot to black screen

sudo less /var/log/Xorg.).log
will allow you to look at it one page at a time (less is a pager, like more, only better). Youcan use the space to move ahead a page, b to move back a page, up and down arrows will probably work to move line by line, and q to quit.

You will see many lines reporting loading of modules and so forth and one of them will tell you which driver is being loaded. That might be Vesa or S3 or something. If it failed there will probably be something at the very end that says so.

[flarson]

Re: Boot to black screen

I see my poor typing struck again. What you want is
sudo less /var/log/Xorg.0.log

[wanyal]

Re: Boot to black screen

I'm not seeing any failure messages. Apart from maybe

(II) AIGLX: Screen 0 is not DRI capable

[flarson]

Re: Boot to black screen

That is about what I thought. You could also look at /var/log/kdm.log to see if it gives and good info. The "not using DRI" means you do not have hardware acceleration, which is not too surprising.

I expect that KDM is still running and lhinks it is presenting you a login screen. You can find out by running
ps axf
This will show processes and which process started another process. You can move up and down with Shift-PageUp,Shift-PageDown. You should see something like
3108 ? Ss 0:00 /usr/bin/kdm
3126 tty7 Ss+ 14:59 \_ /usr/bin/X -br -nolisten tcp :0 vt7 -auth /var/run/xauth/A:0-mfKEae
3442 ? S 0:00 \_ -:0

and the next line probably says something about greeter. If so it is waiting for you to login but the display is not working, in which case we need to get your X working.

[jglen490]

Re: Boot to black screen

I have just installed Kubuntu on a laptop with:

1.6GHz single core processor (unknown manufacturer)
386MB DDR RAM
60GB HDD
and an S3 graphics chip (unknown model).

Installation would only work if i used safe graphics mode, but did install fine, but when i boot, you see the Kubuntu loading screen, and then it goes black. The screen does not change afterwards.

Can anyone help?

P.S I apologize for the lack of information on the laptop, as it isn't mine.

Yes.

I agree with everyone else's assessment that the S3 video card is likely the culprit. But there is a way to get a fix in. First, you need to hit the 'esc' key as soon as Grub starts. There is normally a 3 second delay that will allow you to stop Grub and run other commands. Once you hit the 'esc' key, Grub should drop you to a prompt and allow you to select rescue mode. When you select rescue, you will be presented with a root prompt (after the kernel boots). From there you can enter various commands.

Enter:

cd /etc/X11

Then enter:

less xorg.conf

If the file exists, you will be able to scroll up and down the file using the the 'less' file display processor. The 'less' processor is not an editor, but it will display the contents of the file. Scroll down untill you see:

Section "Device"

. Copy down whatever you see and respond back to us.

[kyonides]

Re: Boot to black screen

You can get the S3 graphic chip by entering lspci on Konsole. Then look for something like "VGA-compatible" line and there you'll find the chip's model.

[flarson]

Re: Boot to black screen

Try what Nate suggest in the last post here
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3102696.0
That will almost certainly fix your problem.