#1 2015-12-22 10:14:57

beng

Member

Registered: 2015-09-29

Posts: 81

post installation black screen (Nvidia card / Nouveau driver)

Hi

[EDIT: Please make sure you read this post thoroughly before you do anything - clarifications added in Head_on_a_Stick's answer - Thanks!]

I just want to report on an unexpected solution to the black screen experienced after the very first reboot following a new installation on a machine with an Nvidia graphic card (tried and tested on 2 different Dell machines, with respectively 2 different Nvidia cards)
A reboot into recovery mode points to a Nouveau driver issue... (Incidently network is not up and running)

2 solutions:

1) the Nvidia driver solution:
Install nvidia-detect, run it and identify your Nvidia graphic card,
Get the matching driver from Nvidia support site (download > Drivers > Unix > Linux),
Install the driver and nvidia-xconfig,
Run nvidia-xconfig to generate a xorg.conf,
Reboot your machine,
If you have an issue with the font size, just add these 2 lines to the xorg.conf (in etc/x11), under the Section "Screen"

    Option         "UseEdidDpi" "False"
    Option         "DPI" "96 x 96"

Reboot --> et voila!

1) the Nouveau driver solution:
The open Nouveau driver is provided with BL and claims it can manage Nvidia Graphic card (therefore no need for the proprietary Nvidia driver).

Following the black screen, reboot the machine into recovery mode in Grub,
Edit the interfaces file (in etc/network)
either with nano or in graphical mode after launching X (startx)
with

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

(edit accordingly to your connection type)
This will activate your Internet connection.
Reboot --> et voila!

I hope this will help some a you with a similar configuration
beng

Last edited by beng (2015-12-22 12:29:10)

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: London

Registered: 2015-09-29

Posts: 9,093

Website

Re: post installation black screen (Nvidia card / Nouveau driver)

Hello beng, welcome to the forums.

Thank you for posting this

However, I have a few observations.

Firstly, it is not generally recommended to install the NVIDIA drivers directly from their site.

See this link for more:
https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian … ll_scripts

NVIDIA users are advised to follow this guide if they wish to employ the proprietary drivers:
https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsD … 2Jessie.22

If the very latest version of the drivers is required, it is *possible* to install them from the experimental repositories but the exact current versions of the driver and all dependencies must be explicitly specified on the command line.

See http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=598160#p598160 and my first post in that thread.

Secondly, I am utterly perplexed as to why enabling your ethernet connection fixes a graphical issue

The standard solution to a blank screen with NVIDIA is to disable kernel modesetting by booting with these kernel command line parameters:

nomodeset nouveau.modeset=0

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/KM … odesetting

EDIT: I'm getting confused here, KMS seems to be required for the nouveau driver.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Nouveau#Loading

Last edited by Head_on_a_Stick (2015-12-22 11:15:09)

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Para todos todo, para nosotros nada

beng

Member

Registered: 2015-09-29

Posts: 81

Re: post installation black screen (Nvidia card / Nouveau driver)

Hi Head_on_a_Stick

welcome to the forums --> thanks but not my first post (+ #! posts)
Thanks for the clarification; sorry - actually you are probably right:
I must have installed the drivers from Synaptic the first time (this is a follow up to a post I posted on the cruncbang forums in the early days of BL - cannot find it again) rather than from Nvidia site (where I had a look this second time).

Secondly, I am utterly perplexed as to why enabling your ethernet connection fixes a graphical issue hmm

Nor do I but the Nouveau driver was holding me up, once access to the internet was initiated, i got my graphical BL login screen, so i take it it needed something...

Adding an edit to my initial post to make sure people read the post thoroughly so they don't get confused / before they do anything
beng