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My HP Pavillion Dv5 1004nr worked great with Ubuntu up until 11.04. Now, ever since Unity desktop environment the display has been sporadic at best. I was told that the video driver bugs (known and largely ignored) were fixed for the ATI raedon card in my laptop with 13.04. So I installed it. 13.04 doesn't even detect the display. Boots to black screen every time now. Is there ever going to be a fix for the AMD architecture with ATI raedon chipsets? do the developers even care? this has been an issue for years, and no sign of a fix in sight....

Patrick Millius
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The legacy graphics driver that you need is not available in the Ubuntu Software Center in Ubuntu 13.04. That is why you're getting a black screen. This is also the reason why your HP Pavilion dv5-1004nr laptop worked great with Ubuntu up until Ubuntu 11.04.

However you can still install the correct graphics driver for your HP Pavilion dv5 1004nr laptop on Ubuntu 13.04 by adding this Ubuntu PPA (Personal Package Archive): ppa:makson96/fglrx to your system's Software Sources. In order to install the AMD Catalyst Legacy 13.1 graphics driver on Ubuntu 13.04, open the terminal and run the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:makson96/fglrx
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install fglrx-legacy

...and then reboot to enable the AMD Catalyst Legacy 13.1 graphics driver.

Taking a longer range view of things, the AMD Catalyst Legacy 13.1 graphics driver is not supported for Ubuntu 13.10, and Ubuntu 13.04 will not be supported by updates after January, 2014. So that doesn't give you an operating system that is supported by updates for a long period of time unless you install Ubuntu 12.04, which is a Long Term Support release that is supported by updates until April, 2017. The same terminal commands listed above are also the commands used to install the AMD Catalyst Legacy 13.1 graphics driver in Ubuntu 12.04.

For the time being you still have Ubuntu 13.04, so this gives you an opportunity to test whether the AMD Catalyst Legacy 13.1 graphics driver solves your black screen problem, and then after that you can decide whether or not to install Ubuntu 12.04.

karel
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  • so if I replace 13.04 with 12.04 LTS do I still run "apt-get upgrade"? I only went to 13.04 in hopes that Ubuntu would have addressed my legacy driver issue.... – Patrick Millius Oct 21 '13 at 01:09
  • Yes, you should still run sudo apt-get upgrade and this command won't upgrade your Ubuntu distribution to the next version. apt-get upgrade is used to install the newest versions of all packages currently installed on the system from the sources enumerated in /etc/apt/sources.list. Packages currently installed with new versions available are retrieved and upgraded; under no circumstances are currently installed packages removed, or packages not already installed retrieved and installed. – karel Oct 21 '13 at 04:01
  • I did the above, restarted a few times now, still no display. I know the display is working; I can force BIOS and get display - sometimes. When I use an auxiliary display and use the "displays" utility in the GUI it seems Ubuntu does not detect the built in display. The Legacy driver did do one thing - the auxiliary display now says "format not supported" when the desktop starts. Splash page still comes up though, so all I can do is alt+control+F4 and use command line. I would really like to resolve this as the laptop is a great unit and up until 11.04 Ubuntu was the best O/S I've used. – Patrick Millius Oct 21 '13 at 23:31
  • BTW before I did the fglrx legacy stuff I removed 13.04 and re-installed 12.04... – Patrick Millius Oct 21 '13 at 23:37
  • I haven't got the solution to your problem. Nevertheless there is one more thing you should do. There is a website called PlayTool that has a lot of helpful information about how to diagnose possible graphics card problems. I would also add that if you had a completely broken RAM stick, then you would probably get no screen display at all, not even the BIOS splash screen. – karel Oct 21 '13 at 23:47
  • so I have some progress, the laptop screen will come on sometimes, usually if it is on battery power. Ubuntu now detects the aux. monitor as "laptop". I get a system error that fglrx-legacy did not install properly, apt does not send a report as this is not official ubuntu package. Can I find and error log somewhere? Would it help you help me if I do?

    Thanks

     – Patrick Millius Oct 22 '13 at 03:32
  • There are certain types of hardware issues that are more easily diagnosed by using software tools like smartmontools, memtest (which is called Test Memory in the Ubuntu live DVD), Psensor and System Testing. All of these software testing tools give results that are easier to understand than searching the log files, which are located in the /var/log directory. – karel Oct 22 '13 at 12:05