New Installation Boots to Black Screen

Question

I recently installed Xubuntu 16.04 LTS on my HP Pavilion. Unfortunately, after installing and restarting it immediately boots to a black screen.

Hardware specs are as follows:

• CPU: A4 3300m

• GPU: Radeon HD 6480G (APU)

• RAM: 4GB

Note that I have had the same problem on multiple distributions of Ubuntu starting as far back as 14.04 and on every flavor of Ubuntu (Kubuntu, Ubuntu, even Mint).

On those previous installations I added nomodeset to my grub commands, and then installed fglrx which actually fixed the problem (despite suggestions to fix the problem saying that fglrx should be uninstalled). Now, however, fglrx is no longer supported on Ubuntu 16.04 so this method doesn't work.

My understanding is that it is a bug with the open source driver, but this seems unlikely since I've not seen any bug reports on it, and this issue has been around for at least 2 years.

Any ideas on what I can do?

Solution 1

I had to remove "quiet" and "splash", and add "nomodeset". I hope this helps you.

Solution 2

I've figured out how to fix it!

Instead of "nomodeset" in the grub options, I put "acpi_osi=Linux", and it booted normally with open-source Radeon drivers.

Comments

[Bernmeister]

I had similar issues for Lubuntu a while back and had to fiddle with GRUB settings. This ubuntu-tutorials.com/2010/05/06/… got me started - you might have to try different GRUB options.

[BWombat]

From what I can tell, that post would amount to the same as using the "nomodeset" option (for AMD cards I would use radeon.modeset=0), but this would result in the computer booting in software rendering mode which is undesirable. I appreciate your help though!