Black screen at boot up

Recently installed the latest ATI driver for my Laptop, and since I’ve only been able to boot openSuSE in failsafe mode. The standard mode just presents me with an unrecoverable black screen at a point some time before the login screen. I’ve tried several versions of the aticonfig which does nothing, I’ve tried ‘building’ a distro specific driver from the installer which does nothing, I’ve tried adding a repository and downloading from there, which does nothing.

Is there anyway to launch my machine with the ATI driver. If you didn’t realise, it was working before hand, and now it’s rendered my machine useless.

It’s a dell studio 1745, 4gb ram, dual 2.1ghz processor, ATI mobility 4650

any ideas?

Hi,

First thing : you said it was working before, so what did you do to break it? If it was working before, is it because the proprietary driver wasn’t installed?

Did you try that script … which does everything ?

Upgrading ATI driver with atiupgrade

it broke the first time I restarted after installing the latest linux ATI driver, so yes

I have a hunch that it may be because I havn’t been able to configure aticonfig properly. When ever I try to launch catalyst control centre I get an error message:

There was a problem initializing Catalyst Control Center Linux edition. It could be caused by the following.

No ATI graphics driver is installed, or the ATI driver is not functioning properly.
Please install the ATI driver appropriate for you ATI hardware, or configure using aticonfig.

Focussing on the last line, either the driver instal failed wit his doubly unlikly (first, how did the cataylist control centre get there, and second, how did it brake otherwise) or the suggestions I’ve had to run aticonfig havn’t worked

So far I’ve tried
aticonfig (which outputs a help file about aticonfig, which I can’t read because it goes above my screen)
aticonfig --initial
aticonfig --initial --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf

and non work. Any ideas?

Can’t run the script because I can’t find a command to stop X…

scratch that, found a command (/sbin/init 3), but i’m getting huge number of error messages throughout all parts of the script, some ending with ‘(a) aborted by user’ despite me definitely not pressing a. Others say things like ‘see above part of script for a hint’ where it says something like ‘unusual command’ or something

any ideas?

sorry for double post but that ‘unusual command’ is actualy abstract command.cc:224

tried twice now, same thing…

anyone got any ideas?

btw fglrxinfo outputs: ‘segmentation fault’

Just boot in runlevel 3 (console mode). At the Grub menu, append 3 preceeded by a space in the options line. Than press Enter to boot normally. You’ll get a normal console login prompt. Log in as root. Than try to run the script and report here (error messages if any).

I just read 2 minutes ago (ATI Drivers - New Release, 10.10 and 10.11) that the catalyst driver has been updated. The atiupgrade script downloads the installer, build a rpm package and install the driver for version 10.10. It will propably work with the latest (just 2 days old) version 10.11. I haven’t tested it yet. Hower, to install the latest version, the line
catalystVer="10-10"
at the top of the script should be replaced with
catalystVer="10-11"
I doubt it will make a difference for you but I just wanted to let you know.
All I can tell is that by changing the version in the script, it does download the latest installer (ati-driver-installer-10-11-x86.x86_64.run) which is the file needed for the installation. I just checked that.

I updated the script to the latest Catalyst version here: Upgrading ATI driver with atiupgrade
I used it to update Catalyst without problems. Of course, I already had everything else installed (kernel headers, compiler, etc). I just changed the version number as I described above. So if you apply that change yourself, it comes to the same. I would suggest to take a look at the post #9 of that thread, describing precisely the output produced by a successful installation and the module compilation which follows (it actually belongs to the rpm package installation). Also please read an apply the change explained in post #10 if you had another version of the ATI proprietary driver already installed and the script deinstalled it. Otherwise you might have to run aticonfig --initial (but only after the driver has been successfully installed).

tried again, with the new atiupgrade and from booting into run level 3 as opposed to switching to it after login.

Same thing, it simply doesn’t work. It loads the file, and then the ouput consists of one line of code, followed directly by an error message followed by a follow up message (normally stating 'see above line for hint). The errors are so numerous that I can’t read them all, but here are a few:

Abstract command.cc:244 (this one is everywhere at the begging)
Failed to download
Installation aborted by user (despite the fact I didn’t choose anything, it automatically chose ‘a’, this one happens quite a lot)
Failed to mount CD
Please insert medium
Can’t provide file (file directory blah blah blah) :Media exception
Problem retrieving file

the above appear numerous times, and there are probably others that i can’t see because they go by too fast

It then finally ends with: 'Directory /usr/src/linux - 2.6.34.7-0.5 not found. Make sure that Kernel 2.6.34.7-0.5 sources are installed

any further ideas?

Ah progress!

found an update for kernel, and now I get further!

it now brakes at: ‘no ATI installer found. Script aborted’

help?

atiupgrade will download the ATI installer from ATI website and install other packages from openSUSE repositories if needed.
So the first thing to do is to check your Internet connection. Try to ping someone.
For example: ping -c 2 abcnews.com
If you have a connection, change to /tmp directory
cd /tmp
and download the installer with:

**wget [noparse]https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/ati-driver-installer-10-11-x86.x86_64.run[/noparse]**

(However the script should do that too.)
Then run the script again. If the installer is present, the script won’t download it again. If there are more than one installer present, the script will abort. So if you had ati-driver-installer-10-10-x86.x86_64.run already in /tmp from a previous attempt, you should delete this file before running the script.

Okay thanks, will try again soon

tried as you suggested, but it is still stopping with ‘no ATI installer found. Script aborted’

before it there a still a huge number of errors, particularly that ‘Abstract command.cc:244’ one

I’m obviously missing something. Judging by the nature of the message it would seem to suggest perhaps some low level application of header or something. Is there anything specific i need for your script?

I don’t know what that error comes from: ‘Abstract command.cc:244’. I have really no idea. So, before I start to add debugging lines to the script, please do the following while logged in as root (oder su -l).

  • copy the script in /usr/bin. (I know, it’s not very elegant, but at least it will be in your path and you can still move it to ~/bin later - I’m just trying to make things easier at this point.)
  • Make the script executable with:
    chmod 755 /usr/bin/atiupgrade
  • Change to /tmp directory
    cd /tmp
  • Just create a new subdirectory, so it will be empty for sure.
    mkdir ati
  • Change to that directory
    cd ati
  • Run the script
    atiupgrade
  • If you have an internet connection, you should see something like that (after a while):
--2010-11-25 16:27:56--  https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/ati-driver-installer-10-11-x86.x86_64.run
Resolving a248.e.akamai.net... 24.244.17.65, 24.244.17.41
Connecting to a248.e.akamai.net|24.244.17.65|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 123939635 (118M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `ati-driver-installer-10-11-x86.x86_64.run'

100%============================================================================================>] 123,939,635  885K/s   in 2m 4s   

2010-11-25 16:30:01 (977 KB/s) - `**ati-driver-installer-10-11-x86.x86_64.run' saved [123939635/123939635]**

If you don’t see that, you weren’t able to download the installer and so the script will abort. If on the contrary you see that, then the file ati-driver-installer-10-11-x86.x86_64.run should be present in the current directory and the script will proceed. If - for some reason - it does not, I would say that it’s a bug I need to fix.

finally got it to work

I reinstalled opensuse completely, updated kernel, used an Ethernet cable (didn’t realise wireless didn’t work), ran the script and got it to work. I can now use open suse with the ati driver

so thanks for you help!

the ironic thing is though that the whole reason I installed the driver in the first place was to play hive rise. Guess what? Still doesn’t work. Sorry if this has now turned into a rant, but isn’t it funny that it has taken the ‘more stable’ linux two weeks to attempt to play it, and windows 5 mins?

anyway, like I say thanks for all your help and sorry for wasting your time. I guess the two main problems was that I didn’t use the cable, and that I had installed the driver so many times it had corrupted something or other…

so, back to windows I guess…