'Booting in blind mode' back with a vengeance.

[Scottbert]

I switched to Linux from Windows back in March. It has, for the most part, worked out better than expected.

(Note: I started on Cosmic Cuttlefish, and updated to Disco Dingo a little while after it came out. I was going to update to Eoan Ermine, but it has weird display problems with window dressing, which is a whole other discussion)

However, something that has continually bothered me is that as long as nvidia drivers are installed, I don't get a terminal. Linux boots in 'blind mode' and doesn't show me any diagnostic startup messages, which is no more helpful than Windows was. (A few weeks into using kubuntu, I actually had my desktop break, and with no terminal to fall back on, fixing was a nightmare. Eventually I gave up and reinstalled. I lost some stuff.) I spent hours, and hours, and hours trying to resolve this with no success.

I figured that this was just an unresolvable problem. However...

On November 1st I did a routine reboot of my system, and suddenly I had the terminal again! I could see startup messages, I could see shutdown messages, I could access the teminal, all was great! I was glad that this longstanding bug was fixed...

...Until today. A few days ago, I got an icon on my system tray asking me to reboot to finish installing updates; I'm not sure what, exactly, cause it. Today I finally got around to rebooting... and blind mode is back.

Because it worked for awhile, I now know that my graphics driver doesn't actually prevent the terminal from working. What on earth changed at the beginning of the month, and then again just now, to break it?

Also while I'm here, why does my headphone get muted every time I log in, forcing me to run alsamixer to unmute it and turn the volume back up?

[jglen490]

So, I'm not sure what you meant by

... I actually had my desktop break ...

Did the GUI not display? Did you have a blinking dash in the upper left? It totally stopped booting? Did this condition occur right after some update?

Whatever you can remember about what was happening before it failed will be very helpful.

There is a boot parameter, that can be changed, to always send boot messages to the the screen. Plus you can always replay those message in a terminal with the command

dmesg

or you can look at all the logs in a GUI app or in the terminal.

[Scottbert]

Did the GUI not display? Did you have a blinking dash in the upper left? It totally stopped booting? Did this condition occur right after some update?

On login, instead of Plasma starting up it went to the blind terminal. Was there an error message? Who knows! Some idiot programmed linux not to show me...

Anyway, that was back in April or so. I reinstalled and haven't had such a severe problem with linux since, however, it does make me annoyed at this 'blind mode' nonsense since if it ever breaks again I'll be SOL.

As I said before, I've fought with this for HOURS. Changing config files, updating initramfs, changing boot parameters. Nothing works, it's just always 'blind mode'. There's a terminal there, but I can't see it. If I ctrl-alt-f2 over, I can log in blindly and execute commands, but linux is very difficult to use when I can't see what I'm typing or program output.

[MissKitty]

I get the same thing on Ubuntu with Nvidia...generally on the first power up of the day. I think it's a hardware issue with the display or some odd interaction betwixt the Dell display, the Nvidia video card, the Nvidia driver. Also manifests for me with Manjaro and Fedora. Behavior started with the 418 series proprietary driver. Does not happen with the Nouveau driver. If I get a chance later today I'll try to revert to 390 and see if that helps.

If you're on a desktop PC, when you get a "blind mode" startup, wait until disk activity generally subsides then power cycle the display. After powering on again and before the display goes to power save mode because there's no output signal from the video card, <ctrl><alt><f1> might get you the GUI login. Things should be fine after that.

If you're on a laptop without a way to independently power cycle the display, you're pretty committed to holding down the <alt> key then pressing <prtscrn><r><e><i>s><u><b>. That should reboot the machine cleanly. Give a beat or two between each keypress.

My theory is that the driver isn't getting setup data from the display EDID chip (or the EDID is corrupted...very common) and the driver stops loading rather than coming up in an undefined mode. This is a good thing. Or maybe there's a timing issue where EDID chip in the display takes too long to respond, or the data stream get stepped on by another process before it's read by the driver.

[Scottbert]

To be clear, as I've been using linux since March, although it boots in blind mode I get the GUI login screen once SDDM starts. And yes the terminal does display if I switch to noveau, but come on, I play games sometimes and need a real graphics driver.
My concern is more that the lack of terminal means if anything ever goes wrong I have one less diagnostic tool (no error messages, can't see how far in the startup process it got, etc)

For instance, during updating to Disco Dingo, it went to the lock screen, then gave me some nonsense about it couldn't leave the lock screen normally and I had to go log into a terminal and execute a command. Fortunately this was simple enough to do blindly, but I was almost hosed.

[claydoh]

Nvida + linux = headaches (for many)

It may be that the tty sesions are using a 'bad' resolution that the driver is setting.
Often the nomodeset option, or specifying a known good resolution, can fix this problem, which has been a somewhat common one over the years

This shows how to test if nomodeset will work, Luckily, this can be tested from the grub menu before booting, and before making any permanent changes.
https://www.dell.com/support/article...ooting?lang=en

Also, depending on which card you have (hint, hint ), a more recent driver may perform better, if you have not yet used any PPAs for this.

[Scottbert]

@claydoh: Thank you for your advice! Unfortunately, nomodeset and different graphics driver versions are among the things I've already tried.

Does anyone know what might have changed at the end of October, and then again recently, that made it work for awhile?

[oshunluvr]

Does anyone know what might have changed at the end of October, and then again recently, that made it work for awhile?

kernel

[GreyGeek]

It seems as though both your Konsole foreground and background colors are set to the same value. For example, Black on Black, or White on White, instead of contrasting colors like Black on Lite Yellow, etc... You can "Edit Current Profile" in Konsole's settings, then select the "Appearance" tab, then click the Edit button. There you can notice if your foreground and background colors are the same or different. If the foreground color is the same as the background color left-mouse on the foreground color and the color pallet GUI will display choose your setting to make the kind of contrast you wish and then left click "Apply", left click "OK", etc.

[Scottbert]

@oshunlubr: That was my first thought too! Immediately after it broke I tried using old kernel versions. No dice.

@GreyGeek: Konsole is fine. It's the raw linux terminal -- the thing that SHOULD be showing me bootup/shutdown messages when no GUI is running, or that should let me do a text-only session with ctrl+alt+f2, that's not working.

[Snowhog]

You want to edit /etc/default/grub. See https://askubuntu.com/questions/248/...-ubuntu-starts

After you've made the change, and quite/saved the file, in a konsole run: sudo update-grub

Reboot.

[Scottbert]

You want to edit /etc/default/grub. See https://askubuntu.com/questions/248/...-ubuntu-starts

After you've made the change, and quite/saved the file, in a konsole run: sudo update-grub

Reboot.

I appreciate the thought, but I guess I'm still not getting across the nature of the problem -- it isn't that the grub or linux is configured to hide anything. For some reason, it thinks there is no valid video mode to use and boots in 'blind mode' -- even though it displays text telling me so! But adding nomodeset or specifying video modes in grub's config doesn't work either...

[Don B. Cilly]

And yes the terminal does display if I switch to nouveau, but come on, I play games sometimes and need a real graphics driver.

Have you tried playing them with the nouveau driver? Maybe the current version is better...

Also, what driver are you using? Try
nvidia-settings

My Neon 5.17 installed 430.50 "out of the box" and I don't seem to have issues with it.
Maybe you can try with different drivers...

[Scottbert]

I have 418.56 installed. I think I tried higher versions through some PPA, but they didn't help, and I reverted to 418 because it was in ubuntu's repository.

So I just noticed something weird--
The existence of a series of packages in Muon named
linux-modules-nvidia-418-5.0.0-xx-generic
linux-modules-nvidia-418-5.0.0-xx-lowlatency
where xx is 31-36. I'm currently on kernel 5.0.0-36.

I have none of them installed. The package description says "You likely do not want to install this package directly. Instead, install the linux-image-nvidia-FLAVOUR meta-package, which will ensure that upgrades work correctly, and that supporting packages are also installed." However, no such meta-package seems to exist in the repository.

There are also packages in the repository named linux-modules-nvidia-418-generic (and also lowlatency.)

I wonder if installing linux-modules-nvidia-418-generic or linux-modules-nvidia-418-5.0.0-36-generic might help, but I'm afraid of breaking something without knowing exactly what I'm doing. Any thoughts?

[Don B. Cilly]

Afraid not.
But... how about doing a separate install of the same system on a different partition, or a USB stick, and use it for testing?
That way, you can break it as much as you like... :·)