Black Screen of Death Permission Issue

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

I am looking for some help on what I am beginning to think is a permissions issue. I have consistently gotten a black screen of death after booting my laptop normally.

The system fails to start the kdm and just sites at a black screen.

Now As to the why of what has lead me to believe that this is a permissions issue not just a hardware issue.

  1. If I start the system in Init 3 and then enter su mode. After which I type in kdm and hit return everything starts up just fine. I even get one restart that works with no black screen of death.

  2. If this where just a simple hardware issue then nothing would work to get the kdm up and going.

I am looking for advice outside of hardware and driver fixes as
I have that in control except for this black screen issue. Unless
some one here has found the answer to fixing Newly defined ATI legacy Cards

I am looking for thoughts on possible fixes that involve getting
the kdm to start without using init 3 and super user mode ever
other startup.

I and several others had our xpress 200m starting normally after
we refreshed our xorg and kdm installs. This has since stopped
working for us.

If there is a log I can post with the error info after a failed boot I
haven’t yet come across it. Please let me know if there is any
info that I can post to get better feed back on this.

Spec’s
Opensuse 11.2|amd 2ghz cpu | ati xpress 200m | 1gb of Ram | open source Radeon loaded****

#2

Hi,

This is probably way off, but just an idea.

If you have your machine to automatically log in at startup, if you disable this, does it get you to the log in screen?

Also have you tried installing updates, maybe that will help?

Or maybe it was an update that broke it? Did you install any updates just before the problem happened?

Maybe there is a problem with conflicting repositories?

Regards,
Barry.

#3

I had that issue in 11.1 on an intel based laptop, so I now make
sure to leave that option unselected at install time. It causes
all kind of permission issues with applications in my experience.
So I can see why it would be a good option for trouble shotting
this problem.

#4

I am wondering if this question could also be asked in the applications thread?

This issue is getting little feed back it would seem, so it might not hurt to spread the net a little wider.

As far as logs go try /var/log and look at the kdm.log and xorg log files.

#5

Thanks for the idea J100 I have thought of posting this else where, I’m just a little unsure as to which thread is the most in line with the issue.

Thanks for the log idea I will be posting my log’s later today for review.

On an unrelated topic I just upgraded to kde 4.3.4 and experienced a complete failure of xorg after two shutdowns. I then learned that the xorg was trying to use fglrx again. It had been using radeon until the upgrade. But stranger still now my desktop effects are working like a dream no artifacts or glitches to speek of. This will drive me mad yet.

#6

A Fix for Black screen on Xpress 200 and it seem possibly other xpress cards

This maybe a fix for the black screen issue in 11.2 for ati xpress cards.

No promises, but we need testers to make sure it works.

O And Please post if it does or does not work.