I just bought a new monitor (hdmi) and set it up as the primary and put the other monitor (dvi) as secondary alongside it. Everything worked perfectly for a few hours, but all of a sudden the secondary monitor went black and the primary one was just horizontal green lines (different green colors). This has never happened in 5+ years of using openSUSE and 3 years of my previous monitor (which is now the dvi monitor but was hdmi before - the computer only has one hdmi port).
Unplugging/replugging the hdmi monitor didn’t fix it and no keys seemed to do anything either.
What graphics card? What driver? What DE? How old is the graphics card? Laptop or desktop (desktop probably)?
Having asked that, it looks like a hardware problem.
Any bent pins on the cables/sockets?
Can you try with another(other) cable(s)? Is the HDMI cable just that, or a DVI-HDMI converter?
Can you try with another port, like VGA if available?
I’d try one monitor/cable combination at a time. If none works, try in another computer. If the monitor/cable work there, a last ditch effort could be changing graphics driver. If not, I’d say it’s a damaged card.
If a desktop and a dedicated card, try switching to onboard video (if available) to test the cable/monitor.
If it’s onboard video on a desktop and it’s borked, you can always install a dedicated card.
I have the AMD Radeon HD6410D Graphics.
Processor: AMD A4-3400 APU with Radeon HD Graphics. (So open source Radeon driver)
The computer is the Acer AX1470-UR30P (Desktop)
No.
The HDMI cable is the same one I’ve used for years with no issues. And this issue ONLY occurs if I have the VGA (second) monitor also on - and it doesn’t happen right away. Usually it’s after a while and seems to be when something slightly graphically intensive is happening on the second monitor.
The second one is VGA (sorry, thought was DVI)
If I only run the HDMI monitor, everything works. Ran for an entire day no issue. But both monitors leads to this issue eventually (has happend twice now)
I’m using the onboard card.
I don’t think it’s borked, could it be the Radeon driver? Should I switch to Catalyst?
After this happens, it would be good to see the contents of
an xorg log
dmesg or system log
(After it happens, shutdown and revert to your one monitor setup and then fire up again into a working system. The xorg log will be the “old” one … your system log will depend upon whatever method of logging you’re using, but obviously we’ll be interested in the contents generated during the prior session when things went wonky.)
Just to be clear (as I may have assumed the system was borked entirely until you revert to a one display setup) — > after the issue occurs, does a simple reboot correct the problem?