Black screen upon starting up Kubuntu

[Marcelo Magno T. Sales]

Em Quarta-feira 10 Março 2010, Alan Dacey Sr. escreveu:
> On Wednesday 10 March 2010 08:14:56 pm Keith Clark wrote:
> > I have an up to date installation of Ubuntu/Kubuntu 10.04 Alpha 3
> > and I cannot seem to start up Kubuntu.  It starts, I see the
> > initial startup screen, it fades to a black background.  Akonadi
> > starts up fine but turns black right after that.  I can hit Alt-F2
> > and the command window pops up.  I can hit ctl-alt-del and the
> > logout window pops up fine but I cannot do much else as I cannot
> > see any menu bars or backgrounds.
> >
> > Any help would be appreciated.
> >
> > Keith
> 
> I tried installing a fresh 10.04 A3 and had a similar problem.  I
>  just drop to tty 2 and can't use the gui at all, tty 7 seems to be
>  forbidden.  No amount of changing/purging/tweaking the nvidia
>  drivers help at all.  I also can't get to boot from the cd on a
>  stick, although that may be my motherboard.  I also installed the
>  first 10.04 beta in a separate partition and upgraded it every time
>  I booted into it.  I can not get any composting working in that one.
>   I have a feeling that something is still being hammered out in the
>  video code and is not quite ready.  The only things I have not done
>  is test with a new user and if that doesn't work then purge the
>  entire KDE desktop, reboot, and install it again.
> I'll be following this thread if anybody has better ideas.
>

I've been through a similar problem with nvidia drivers and GeForce 
310M. In my case, there were four problems:

1. The nouveau driver would always be loaded after installing the nvidia 
proprietary driver, even if blacklisted. I had to remove it. Not 
removing nouveau would cause the LCD to be turned off before the login 
screen was displayed.
2. The nvidia driver would not properly detect my laptop's LCD panel 
(VAIO VPCF111FB). I had to manually edit xorg.conf and force it to use 
the LCD with the following line in the "Screen" section:
Option "ConnectedMonitor" "DFP-0"
3. The nvidia driver would not read the EDID information from the LCD 
panel, even after forcing the detection with the above line. So, I had 
to install Windows, read EDID from there and save it to a file, which 
then was referenced in xorg.conf with the following line:
Option "CustomEDID" "DFP-0:/etc/X11/EDID.raw" # I named the file saved 
in windows EDID.raw
4. At last, I couldn't install Kubuntu because the installation software 
was aborting with an error right after selecting the language when using 
The Kubuntu ISO. So, I installed Ubuntu and later installed kubuntu-
desktop. The problem is that gdm will not work well with plymouth after 
the installation of the nvidia driver. The login screen was displayed, 
but if I typed "2" or ENTER the X server would die and the computer 
would appear to be frozen (but I could still access it from the network 
with ssh). After a little research, I found out that gdm was starting on 
the second console before all TTY were initialized. After typing "2" or 
ENTER, X would crash and then gdm would re-spawn on the seventh console, 
were it would work ok, but only if nvidia driver was not installed. So, 
I had to remove plymouth to make gdm start on the seventh console in the 
first try. kdm do not have this problem.

Now I have 10.04 with KDE and the nvidia driver running flawlessly, but 
no graphical boot. 

[]'s
Marcelo