Black screen when booting LMDE 201204 with Intel graphics
Posted: Thu May 10, 2012 12:08 pm
Hi all,
This should probably be marked [SOLVED] since I managed to find a workaround, but I thought I would post my experiences here in case it might help somebody else with the same problem.
The problem: When booting a Foxconn 45CSX barebones system (which has an Intel GMA 950 graphics chip) from the 201204-mate-cinnamon image, the system seems to boot normally, but when the gui starts loading, the screen goes black, the mouse cursor makes a brief appearance, and then the screen goes black again. I managed to install by hitting Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, which took me to the mdm login screen, changing the session to Cinnamon and logging in with username "mint" and no password. That loaded Cinnamon and I was able to run the installer.
However, after the install completes, when it tries to load MATE it exhibits the same behavior with the screen going black. I found that if I added "nomodeset acpi=off" to the grub boot options I could get MATE to load, but then there's no acpi. After a lot of googling, I found this:
http://wiki.debian.org/KernelModesetting (See the section under known bugs for 945GM and 82865G)
Which led me to experiment with setting options for i915 at boot. I found that if I added "i915.modeset=0" to the grub boot options, I could load MATE without having to disable acpi or using nomodeset, so I added that to /etc/default/grub under the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT option and ran update-grub to make it permanent. This must override the setting in /etc/modprobe.d/i915-kms.conf, which has modeset=1. So probably changing that would work too.
So, those are my findings. Not sure if it warrants a bug report.
Cheers,
rootchick
This should probably be marked [SOLVED] since I managed to find a workaround, but I thought I would post my experiences here in case it might help somebody else with the same problem.
The problem: When booting a Foxconn 45CSX barebones system (which has an Intel GMA 950 graphics chip) from the 201204-mate-cinnamon image, the system seems to boot normally, but when the gui starts loading, the screen goes black, the mouse cursor makes a brief appearance, and then the screen goes black again. I managed to install by hitting Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, which took me to the mdm login screen, changing the session to Cinnamon and logging in with username "mint" and no password. That loaded Cinnamon and I was able to run the installer.
However, after the install completes, when it tries to load MATE it exhibits the same behavior with the screen going black. I found that if I added "nomodeset acpi=off" to the grub boot options I could get MATE to load, but then there's no acpi. After a lot of googling, I found this:
http://wiki.debian.org/KernelModesetting (See the section under known bugs for 945GM and 82865G)
Which led me to experiment with setting options for i915 at boot. I found that if I added "i915.modeset=0" to the grub boot options, I could load MATE without having to disable acpi or using nomodeset, so I added that to /etc/default/grub under the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT option and ran update-grub to make it permanent. This must override the setting in /etc/modprobe.d/i915-kms.conf, which has modeset=1. So probably changing that would work too.
So, those are my findings. Not sure if it warrants a bug report.
Cheers,
rootchick