When I try to boot into a freshly installed (or a live system) that uses kernel 2.6.38.X (and 2.6.37.X) my screen is located, but is not lid. Meaning that the screen turns black, but when I look VERY closely I can see the desktop appearing on the screen as "shadows". I reckon this is an issue with the kernel, and not specific to any distro, as the problem is the same on both Ubuntu 11.04, OpenSUSE 11.4, Linux Mint 11RC and Debian Sid (When upgrading to kernel 2.6.38) My laptop is: Acer Emachines E527 Cpu: T3300 Intel Celeron grachics: Intel GMA 4500M on 15.6" HD LCD Ram: 3 GB DDR3 Saw a similar bug was reported for a couple of nVidia and AMD systems, but not for Intel based systems. So thought I'd better report this problem. Really don't want to get stuck with kernel 2.6.35 (Which is the newest I've had success with on this system) for the rest of this laptop's lifetime.. :-)
This is the information I get about my graphic card on my Linux Mint 10 -system: Distribution: Linux Mint 10 http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_julia.php Desktop environment: GNOME Graphics chip: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09) Driver in use: intel Rendering method: AIGLX (Which is working, but with a 2.6.35-22 kernel)
Smells like yet another acer with the inverted backlight: Please try the drm-intel-testing branch at http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~danvet/drm-intel/ If that does not help, please attach the full output of lspci -vmmn so that we could try to add another quirk entry.
Assuming this is fixed now. If not, please re-open and we'll add a quirk.
Thanks for your replies. Tried to boot Mageia 2 Beta 3 today, with kernel 3.3.1, and the problem is still the same. So then, it's a problem with the kernels from 2.6.37, and until the most recent ones. One frustrating, new issue, is that when trying to boot with the "safe settings" kernel mode, it didn't turn black, but stoppet with the message "No screens found". I realise that it is diffucult to identify the problem without the "lspci -vmmn" output. But from a black screen, it isn't easy to read anything. (Please explain how, if you have any ideas of how to do that.) Tried to find out how to test the drm-intel-testing branch, but yet again, I don't know how to install this on a system I'm unable to log into. (Due to black screen.) It was really difficult to find out which of the files, on that link, I should download, too. :-) Since I'm probably not the only one with a computer with this issue, I'm really sorry that I don't have the skills to provide more help in solving this issue...
There's an #intel-gfx irc channel on irc.freenode.net you can use to ask for help; building the latest bits would be a good thing to test. If you can, ssh into the machine blind to collect the info we'll need for the quirk, along with a register dump from intel_reg_dumper.
Rune, is this still an issue? Any chance to attach the dmesg with drm.debug=0xe module parameter on a recent kernel, such as v3.7?
Hi! And thanks for your patience. I found out, very recently (december 30. 2012) that the issue now is solved, and the most recently kernels finally works again. So I'm now running Linux Mint 14, 3.5.0-17generic, and it just works. Has tested a few live systems after that, and it seems that something happened between version 3.4 and 3.5. Version 3.7 also seems to be working without this issue.
Rune, thanks for replying. I am closing this as obsolete, as it now works for you, presumably due to some of the numerous fixes in out backlight handling, and debugging old kernel versions is not very productive.
Intel GMA 4500M on 15.6" HD LCD in acer travelmate 5735Z screen is black after boot screen. clearly a kernel 3.x problem. since i-do-not-know-how-long i cannot install a new gnu/linux system of any kind (ubuntu, kubuntu, linux mint, whatever). i could solve the problem temporarily with workarounds as explained online, but this was not doable on the long-term (after updates or whatever happened, the screen turned black again), because the owners of these laptops are not knowledgeable and i cannot leave them with such a system. i am wondering whether within the lifetime of these laptops, gnu/linux will be unproblematic again. i am really sorry for having to wait for years on that issue. it must work out of the box, if i want to prove to people that they can easily use gnu/linux. now they are left with a system that is "no longer supported". today i tried ubuntu 12.04, kubuntu 12.04, linux mint 13 both in 32 bit and 64 bit versions. ---- it worked on a few other laptops (asus, lenovo, acer), but still not on the acer travelmates. best wishes, topgyal
Thubten, can you please file a new bug report for your issue to avoid confusion? Also please describe the workarounds which you've used to make things tempororily work, thanks.
dear daniel thank you for this explanation; i am not sure how to do that, e.g., which category, etc.. -- well, i will try anyway. best wishes, topgyal
> --- Comment #11 from thubten topgyal <thubtop@gmail.com> 2013-02-20 19:02:10 > --- > dear daniel > thank you for this explanation; i am not sure how to do that, > e.g., which category, etc.. -- well, i will try anyway. > best wishes, topgyal Same as this bug here, i.e. DRI -> DRM(Intel) is a good starting point to ensure we don't miss your bug. We'll then take it from there ;-)