[Wlug] Screen goes blank with ubuntu and geforce 8800 GTS.

[Mike]

Hi,
It sounds like something funny is going on with the boot splash program.
If this was happening to me I would turn it of and do some debugging.

You can do this right from grub. When the menu appears hit 'e' (less the
quotes of course) to edit. Then move the cursor down once to the kernel
line. Hit 'e' again and remove the words 'splash' and 'quiet' from the
line. Then hit <enter>, and lastly 'b' to boot.

This is a one time change for this boot. You can make these changes
permanent by editing the /boot/grub/menu.lst. Read the directions inside
the comments and modify it appropriately. Do not edit the lines directly.
If you do they will get overwritten by an update. Once you have edited the
file appropriately run the 'update-grub' command and reboot.

There is a possibility that you are out of range too. I believe that there
is a configuration file in /etc/usplash. You should be able to change the
splash screens resolution there.

The last bit of advice I can give is to make sure your Nvidia drivers are
up to date (the stock Ubuntu one's "should" work... I haven't had to
download from NVidia in a while). And then you can reconfigure your
xserver by running 'sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg'. Make sure you
select 'nvidia' and the appropriate screen resolutions. Sometimes I find
that NOT specifying the sync ranges of the monitor helps (especially in
laptops).

Hopefully you can get some logs using the advice above. The output from
dmesg and /var/log/Xorg.0.log would also be helpful.

Cheers,
Mike


<quote who="Kieran O'Callaghan">
> I have system I just put together with a PCI-Express Geforce 8800 GTS
> running ubuntu 7.04.  During installation of Ubuntu everything showed up
> fine on screen. After installation, I ran into the problem that right
> after grub starts loading linux, the screen goes blank (monitor light
> turns from green to amber) and stays that way right up until X loads, at
> which point I get video.  This hasn't been a problem so far, but I just
> installed some updates and it seems like now X isn't loading or I'm
> getting some sort of message before X loads, because it turns on and
> just stays blank the whole time.
> It seems like it would be easy if I just put a different video card into
> the system, but I don't even have another PCI express video card. I also
> don't have any PCI video cards anymore.  All I have are AGP cards and
> the system doesn't have an AGP slot. So, it looks like taking the hard
> drive out and moving it to another system is the only option.
> Any thoughts on why the screen is doing that would be appreciated. The
> monitor doesn't seem to be getting no signal, because normally it brings
> up a message saying no signal rather than just blanking. It seems more
> like it's gone into a power saving mode. I've tried it with other
> monitors and had the same results.
>
> --
> Kieran O'Callaghan
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