0

I'm trying to put an issue to bed that has caused problems for the last six months on a Dell XPS tower that I ordered with Windows 10. I installed Ubuntu 18.04 as a second OS, and disabled the purple splash screen (removed quiet splash from grub.cfg) and here's what happens.

The system boots and starts displaying startup messages. That works fine until the screen switches modes, at which point the messages freeze, the lower part of the screen fills with dashed lines, and two other lines appear about a quarter of the way down. After a minute or so, those two lines are joined by a third line between them. Nothing further happens on the screen.

Here's the weird part. If I hit the power button after the third line appears, the system takes about a minute and goes into suspend mode, with a pulsing light in the power button. I hit the power button one more time, and the computer wakes up to a perfectly normal login screen. From there on, everything works fine and I can use the system for days, no problem. There is no problem if I boot into Windows 10, the system just works normally.

I'd like to stop needing the suspend/resume cycle (which fails about 10% of the time) and have the system just boot into the correct video mode. Does anybody have any idea what's happening and how I can fix it?

mobilityguy
  • 101
  • I would check the BIOS release first, then concentrate on video drivers. Have you tried nomodeset? – Adriaan Oct 09 '20 at 11:41
  • The BIOS is current. Nomodeset got me partway there - the system boots cleanly, but does not recognize the attached monitor, so it will only work in 800x600 resolution. I tried all kinds of commands in xrandr and nothing works - since it doesn't recognize a monitor, it doesn't support any other video modes. I tried suspending the system with systemctl suspend, and that does nothing. Even so, this is an improvement - at least I know I can always get into the system if the power button trick doesn't work. But I can't use it for production unless I can set a higher video resolution. – mobilityguy Oct 12 '20 at 01:15
  • OK, so with nomodeset you're able to boot without the kernel having issues with the screen or graphics adapter. Next, when X11 (or Wayland?) is started, the server cannot probe the capabilities of your display. I'd say check your video drivers next. Did it come with an nVidia GeForce display adapter? What driver are you using? – Adriaan Oct 12 '20 at 11:45
  • According to this answer, the open source driver assumes that the kernel has initialized the graphics adapter and won't touch it. The nVidia drivers, however, do not make that assumption. So, if you're still using the open source drivers, that would explain this behavior. – Adriaan Oct 12 '20 at 11:53

1 Answers1

0

Adriaan has the answer. I was using the open source X.Org X server. When I switched to the nvidia-driver-450-server driver, which was the only one available that was labeled proprietary and tested, the system came up fine and switched graphics modes during boot just the way it should Thank you for that.

mobilityguy
  • 101