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So I just upgrade my HTPC from 18.04 to 18.10. It has a built in AMD video card and it is plugged in to my tv with a HDMI cable and it is set to autmatically log in. After the upgrade, the computer will boot and have the ubuntu hue like the log in prompt is coming then the screen will go black. I plugged it into a much smaller TV and it did fine but for some reason it doesn't like my wide screen. Any ideas?

Phillip Hall
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  • Computer specs needed. Specifically CPU, GPU, and if possible, hardware specs of your TVs. Did you uninstall all graphics drivers as recommended prior to upgrade? – avisitoritseems Mar 16 '19 at 00:48
  • CPU AMD A8-9600 GPU Integrated AMD Radeon R series. The tv is 10 yrs old Samsung LCD. I didn't uninstall all graphic drivers prior to upgrade. Didn't know I was supposed to. I guess that could be the problem. – Phillip Hall Mar 16 '19 at 11:38
  • Try adding radeon.modeset=0 and/or acpi=off to your GRUB. Add it after the words quiet splash within the quotes of that line. There's some more to make that a permanent fix if it works, but for now let's see if that works. Have you tried to see if the issue is replicated when using a live USB that has 18.04 or 18.10 installed on it? – avisitoritseems Mar 16 '19 at 15:54
  • Actually since you do have access to your screen on the smaller one, what you can try is opening terminal, sudo nano /etc/default/grub, and adding radeon.modeset=0 to the line beginning in GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. That or just purge and reinstall your video drivers. This is interesting to me, I didn't think AMD drivers had issues like Nvidia does. – avisitoritseems Mar 16 '19 at 17:38
  • None of that works. I haven't tried purging and reinstalling the drivers yet. – Phillip Hall Mar 16 '19 at 17:54
  • I tried booting from a usb. The only way to get it to work was to go to advanced options in boot menu and setting nomodeset and aspci=off. One thing that I did notice was when it did boot it showed the line vgacon disables amdgpu kernel modosetting – Phillip Hall Mar 16 '19 at 19:27
  • The easiest solution I can think of is to purge old AMD drivers, install the newest stable graphics drivers for AMD from apt, then rebooting and seeing if it works. If it does not, open up your main OS with the working screen and add nomodeset and aspci=off to GRUB yourself. Save with Ctrl + O -> enter -> Ctrl + X, and in console type sudo update-grub so that your settings your are saved for every boot. This shouldn't cause any performance issues. Here are a couple references that may help: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1613132 https://askubuntu.com/questions/1124197/ – avisitoritseems Mar 16 '19 at 20:26
  • Also a long shot but try sudo modprobe radeon or sudo modprobe amdgpu after installing the correct AMD drivers. If that breaks, use sudo modprobe -r radeon or sudo modprobe -r amdgpu to revert. This should let your system know to load those modules. If one works it's great. If both don't load because it can't find them then you mat be missing drivers. Btw the widescreen issue may be due to missing/incorrect drivers, so really I would look at drivers before literally anything else. – avisitoritseems Mar 16 '19 at 20:34
  • So I did the whole nomodset and aspci=off stuff in the gruband at least it boots now but the display is lower def and I can't play videos. I tried the modprob stuff and that didn't do anything. One thing I did notice was that when it was working it showed AMD Carrizo for video and when it didn't work it showed llvm for video. I will keep researching the driver side of the problem. – Phillip Hall Mar 17 '19 at 01:03
  • Have you installed the drivers? Open software-settings-gtk, which should be called "Software and Updates" in your application launcher, and check the tab 'Additional Drivers'. You should be able to install optimal AMD drivers from there, although I use Nvidia so YMMV with AMD if your specific card requires proprietary drivers to use. The reason to use this route is to have a GUI that gives you an idea of what you're actually using to drive X11. – avisitoritseems Mar 17 '19 at 04:13
  • ...cont; I'm quite certain of this but someone may pass by and correct me if I'm wrong (especially since I don't know if hybrid drivers/dual GPU power saving mode is causing your issues). Try installing proper AMD drivers there. Once you've done so, you may try removing nomodeset and aspci=off to see if it finally works. Also, if you installed proprietary drivers in the past, you should have alternate repos in 'Other Software' that were unticked during the distro upgrade to [ironically] protect you from bugs. You can tick those active and it would be installable via apt. – avisitoritseems Mar 17 '19 at 04:13
  • Ah, I wish I could edit comments past 5 minutes. I failed to notice that modprobe (did you spell it right in console?) failed for both modprobe radeon and modprobe amdgpu. Because you don't have the modules for AMD drivers, this likely means you don't have AMD drivers installed to begin with which definitely would cause issues with display resolution. – avisitoritseems Mar 17 '19 at 04:21
  • Check this out: https://askubuntu.com/a/1066106/913404 ; Looks very related to your issue.

    BTW, if you aren't hellbent on keeping 18.10 and your current system you could reformat and go back to 18.04 to save yourself the time. Ofc, there's no gaurentee that'll work either....

    Another possible solution: changing distro -- https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/6al8ps/linux_distro_with_best_amd_driver_support/dhff3nv/

     – avisitoritseems Mar 17 '19 at 04:28
  • So I have an A8-9600 AMD processor with a built in video processor. According to the AMD website, there is no linux graphics driver for that processor. I will try finding the AMDGPU driver and see what that does. – Phillip Hall Mar 17 '19 at 12:44

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