C0deZer0
Oc'D To Rhythm And Police
Premium
join:2001-10-03
Davenport, FL
 ·Verizon FIOS
| Fresh install of xubuntu blacks out after installing video
First of all, the specs of my personal "oldie" system that used to be my gamer rig:
•XP-m 2400+
•DFI NF2 Ultra Infinity
•2x512MB DDR400 RAM
•nForce onboard audio
•ATi Radeon X1600 Pro (512MB)
•(currently) Maxtor 20GB hard drive (it used to have a Samsung 120GB, but that failed  ).
Long story short... I install Xubuntu 8.04; everything appears to be running just fine; audio, lan, etc. After installing, and running the regular software updates, it says that there is a driver update for the ATi card. I think nothing to install it, and after updates were done/applied, have it restart as it suggests.
Upon restarting, after the "loading up..." text shows, it blacks out... completely. I get nothing to click on, no login menu, nothing. It is just completely black. I tried to restart and going to what it said was a safe mode, but not knowign what the other options where, had it resume normal booting, and it just goes blacked out again.
It's funny how someone else's machine runs linux no problem, and yet it is always with my personal machines that linux decides to do a 180 and create as much frustration as possible.  p.s. no, this is not the same machine that has the Netgear wLAN PCI card *sigh* So what can I try doing in this situation? because where I'm sitting, it just seems like it's already FUBAR.
Also, is there anything in xubuntu that would resemble Windows' device manager? It's just strange to me to have never been able to find anything like this in any of the **buntu distro's I've tried. 
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Front Line Force Fortress Forever |
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No_Strings
Premium,Mod
join:2001-11-22
The OC
Host:
Wireless Networking
All Things Unix
Cox HSI
Qwest
Efficient
| said by C0deZer0  :•ATi Radeon X1600 Pro (512MB) I suspect that's your issue. Install the ATI driver and fix the xorg.conf file. You should be good after that. |
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C0deZer0
Oc'D To Rhythm And Police
Premium
join:2001-10-03
Davenport, FL | How do I fix it if I can't even get to a desktop or see anything?  |
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jimkyle
Btrieve Guy
Premium
join:2002-10-20
Oklahoma City, OK
 ·AT&T Southwest
| Try booting from the Live CD rather than the hard disk. This may get you through the blackout, since the Live CD will use its own drivers rather than the update that you put on the hard disk. If you get there, you should then be able to mount the hard disk (if it's not mounted automagically) and navigate to its /boot/grub/menu.lst file. Open the file, locate all occurrences of the word "splash" and delete them, then save the file (you may need to launch Mousepad via gksudo in order to edit this file).
You can now reboot using the hard disk and you should see the long list of status reports, rather than the logo screen and its progress bar. This may show you exactly where the problem is hitting. You can also edit the menu.lst file to specify using the "vesa" driver for video rather than the ATI driver, but I don't remember just how...
In general, booting from the Live CD is the way to get around a borked hard-disk configuration issue. You can change the video driver in the xorg.conf file from "ATI" to "vesa" and this should give you a usable screen again although at the cost of losing most of the acceleration features of your ATI card...
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Jim Kyle |
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No_Strings
Premium,Mod
join:2001-11-22
The OC
Host:
Wireless Networking
All Things Unix
Cox HSI
Qwest
Efficient
| reply to C0deZer0
said by C0deZer0 :How do I fix it if I can't even get to a desktop or see anything? Ctrl-Alt-Fx to get a console, then use a text editor? |
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C0deZer0
Oc'D To Rhythm And Police
Premium
join:2001-10-03
Davenport, FL | reply to jimkyle
Should I just go ahead and reformat and start fresh? |
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C0deZer0
Oc'D To Rhythm And Police
Premium
join:2001-10-03
Davenport, FL
·Verizon FIOS
| reply to No_Strings
said by No_Strings :said by C0deZer0 :How do I fix it if I can't even get to a desktop or see anything? Ctrl-Alt-Fx to get a console, then use a text editor? Fx? huh? Never saw that key before on any keyboard... most I'd ever seen was Fn, and that was specifically on laptops. |
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No_Strings
Premium,Mod
join:2001-11-22
The OC | Ctrl-Alt-F1, Ctrl-Alt-F2, Ctrl-Alt-F3, ... |
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jimkyle
Btrieve Guy
Premium
join:2002-10-20
Oklahoma City, OK
·AT&T Southwest
| reply to C0deZer0
said by C0deZer0 :Should I just go ahead and reformat and start fresh? That depends on how much customization you've done to the system. I usually spend several days tweaking a system to do what I want, right after installing it, so when something goes wrong a few months later I tend to try to fix it rather than re-installing. However if you've just done the install and haven't added much to the system, that would definitely be the quickest way to solve the problem.
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Jim Kyle |
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C0deZer0
Oc'D To Rhythm And Police
Premium
join:2001-10-03
Davenport, FL
·Verizon FIOS
| Okay, so I finally get it to successfully (re)format and install, and now when I start, it talks about the software updates, but again it pops up with that same notification about updating the ATi driver. And after what just happened, I'm afraid as hell to click that again!  |
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No_Strings
Premium,Mod
join:2001-11-22
The OC | Are you running anything that requires h/w acceleration? If not, don't install the ATI driver. If you need it, install, but be prepared to manually edit the xorg.conf file ass mentioned above. |
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C0deZer0
Oc'D To Rhythm And Police
Premium
join:2001-10-03
Davenport, FL
·Verizon FIOS
| ... okay, this is annoying.
I try to go to ATi directly to download their driver for Linux. I get the file on my desktop, and I try to double-click and it won't run. I open up a terminal, type in the name of the file completely, and it won't run. it keeps saying command not found.
... Seriously, what? it's like who do I have to murder at ATi to get a driver that will just work?   |
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No_Strings
Premium,Mod
join:2001-11-22
The OC | 1. Check the permissions on the driver file. You may need to make it executable: chmod +x filename
2.Why not use the one from the Ubuntu repository? |
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C0deZer0
Oc'D To Rhythm And Police
Premium
join:2001-10-03
Davenport, FL
·Verizon FIOS
| said by No_Strings :2.Why not use the one from the Ubuntu repository? Unless I'm mistaken, the one that xubuntu told me to go get through its notifier for hardware drivers is from the ubuntu repository, and that's the one that led to me having a nice blackout and unable to use the computer at all. |
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No_Strings
Premium,Mod
join:2001-11-22
The OC | Because you didn't make the required changes to the xorg file. I suspect you'll have the same result with the driver from ATI.
Good luck. |
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C0deZer0
Oc'D To Rhythm And Police
Premium
join:2001-10-03
Davenport, FL
·Verizon FIOS
| What xorg file? I just did what it told me to do. It told me I needed the driver, I let it download and install. It asked me to reboot, so I did. When I restart, I got blackout and no way to get anything to turn up.
couldn't it just have done this already? |
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No_Strings
Premium,Mod
join:2001-11-22
The OC
Host:
Wireless Networking
All Things Unix
Cox HSI
Qwest
Efficient
| Do you want to know how to fix it or do you want to whine about how it's not like Windows? I'm trying to help.
You should be able to get to a console as I described above, invoke an editor and make changes to the config file to properly list the driver, resolutions available and the like. |
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firephoto
KDE
Premium
join:2003-03-18
·Verizon west (ex G..
| reply to C0deZer0
Before you do the update that pulls in an ATI update, see what driver is actually being used for your graphics. It's possible the installation set you up with VESA but once it's up and running it's detecting the ATI card and giving you an option to install the driver for that and it's not working.
That card is pretty common so you should be able to find a step by step to make it work. ATI has open drivers now, not sure for that card or not. |
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C0deZer0
Oc'D To Rhythm And Police
Premium
join:2001-10-03
Davenport, FL
·Verizon FIOS
| How do I find out what driver it's using? or for that matter, what hardware it thinks I have? Complete linux n00b here. All I know is that I was able to get my girlfriend's Thinkpad up and running with this version of xubuntu, but now with my system it wants to get all pissy.
And from the looks of ATi's site, it's still a proprietary driver, and it gave me this 57-something MB .run file; tried opening it up in whatever program it is that the package manager had for opening up compressed files thinking that would help, but all it does is just pull up a page showing what formats it does know how to work with. |
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C0deZer0
Oc'D To Rhythm And Police
Premium
join:2001-10-03
Davenport, FL
·Verizon FIOS
| reply to firephoto
Okay, new morning, now...
Where is this xorg file? Which driver should I get? How do I find out what driver it's using for what? Hell, how do I even find out what it thinks I have?
Anyways, to answer the question, as soon as I was running from the installation, it was able to detect right away that I had an ATi card and offered up the driver. But since doing what ubuntu wanted me to do led me to having an inoperable system, now I don't know what to do, and honestly I'm scared as heck to try anything here. |
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