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I've been working on installing Ubuntu on my HP hp 15-ab153nr for the last couple of days. I have tried Ubuntu 16.04.3 and 17.04. I think I have read every post between here and reddit regarding my issue of the AMD Radeon card not working reliably with the current version of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu reports that the card for my laptop is a VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, INc. [AMD/ATi] Carrizo [1002:9874] (rev c5).

This is the old "blank screen" issue (some say black screen). Sometimes I can boot into 16.04.3, sometimes the screen remains blank and I can only hear the familiar drum beat signaling that the Ubuntu sign on screen is up.

When I am able to log in, I have some time to run some housekeeping, but the screen will eventually, quite randomly, go blank.

I'm not doing any nomodeset in Grub or anything. Apparently, that's no longer a work around in 16.04, and when I was doing it, I received very random results anyway.

I haven't messed with AMDGPU-PRO because my card is not listed as supported.

With the number of posts I see on this, I can't believe that no one knows why this is occurring and hasn't arrived at some sort of fix. Unfortunately, that is outside my level of expertise, so I can only ask for assistance.

Thanks all for looking, and I hope to have some useful dialog.

mcmelanson
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1 Answers1

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EDIT (16 Aug 2017):
New drivers are released, check them out.

I have both good news, and bad news for you. This question and answer will probably be outdated in a couple weeks because (good news): AMD stated that this is an issue that they are working on. In fact at the following page amd advices not to upgrade to 16.04.3 yet because in such case your screen WILL go black: http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMDGPU-PRO-Driver-Compatibility-Advisory-with-Ubuntu-16.04.2-and-16.04.3.aspx

The bad news is that there is basically nothing you can do but to wait for AMD to release new drivers, or to downgrade to 16.04.2, which involves messing with packages and stuff. Please go to the website above and send feedback. The drivers are supposed to be released already, they are late.

EDIT: Actually you can get rid of the black screen by removing the driver temporarily. It might be obvious to you as you can login time to time, but I wasn't able to boot when I upgraded to 16.04.3. In such case going into recovery mode when booting, and then proceeding with resume: resume normal boot let me into terminal, and I was able to remove the driver. After that, tearing, fan noise and performance issues will occur of course, but at least you will be able to login with no other issues

MuhsinFatih
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  • Ahhh, I thought I would need to fall all the way back to 15.10. I will follow up and leave the feedback.

    From what I understand 16.04.3 defaults to the open source AMDGPU which is supposed to support my particular card out of the box, while AMDGPU-PRO is the ATI proprietary driver.

    As you said, I considered trying to remove the driver and just utilize the generic driver. I wasn't sure how to do this since I'm a Linux newbie (though it's all available from our friends at Google), so I appreciate you giving me a starting point with that!

     – mcmelanson Aug 12 '17 at 20:07
  • Happy to have prevented such disaster :D This same issue has been driving me nuts for about a week. I am using ubuntu on a macbook pro with amd card. Fans are always on, most videos are annoyingly tearing. What I don't understand is that I couldn't get intel graphics to work either. Hence processor is rendering everything.. sucks. Though I have to admit, I am impressed by my cpu's ability to render my 2880x1800 screen :) – MuhsinFatih Aug 12 '17 at 20:13
  • Oh, sorry I only saw half of your comment at first for some reason. Do you see the grub menu when logging in? If so, chose recovery mode > resume normal boot. It will fail booting into desktop environment and let you into terminal. After that, running amdgpu-pro-uninstall should be enough. If you don't see the grub menu, this might be a good starting point: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RecoveryMode – MuhsinFatih Aug 13 '17 at 11:15
  • I can access Grub by holding down while booting. Haven't messed with it since Friday though. Trying to finish my thesis on steganography for my Masters :) – mcmelanson Aug 13 '17 at 20:12
  • Let me (actually the community) know if it works when you try. If it works, please accept as answer so that other people know whether it works or not:) – MuhsinFatih Aug 13 '17 at 21:30
  • Btw good luck with your thesis :) – MuhsinFatih Aug 13 '17 at 21:31
  • New drivers just got released! See if you have yours available – MuhsinFatih Aug 16 '17 at 17:16
  • This the one you're talking about? http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMDGPU-PRO-Install.aspx – mcmelanson Aug 17 '17 at 02:48
  • The new AMDGPU-PRO driver seems to have done the trick. I've been up and running for about 30 minutes now. Thank you for the assist! – mcmelanson Aug 17 '17 at 03:35