Installation problem Kubuntu 11.04 64Bit & 32Bit : Video Card

[Enzephalograph]

Basic informations about the hardware of my notebook HP 625 WT146EA:

CPU AMD Athlon II P320 / 2.1 GHz

RAM 4 GB Technologie DDR3 SDRAM - 1066 MHz

HDD 320 GB - Serial ATA-300 - 5400 rpm

Drive DVD±RW (±R DL) / DVD-RAM - integrated

Video Card ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200

My problem:
It all began with me trying to install a proprietary video card driver on my working (updated from 10.10) 11.04 64Bit Kubuntu.
After successfully completing the installation and a reboot, I just got a black screen. After many hours of trying to repair this
via the Kubuntu 10.10 Live CD and chroot (tried reinstalling every package, reconfiguring the x server via dpkg / .conf) I finally
gave up and tried to install Kubuntu 11.04 64 Bit from CD - and discovered basically, that Kubuntu 11.04 seems to have this problem embedded.
From the moment I start the Live CD and hit "Enter" on "Start Kubuntu", it shows the loading screen and then...black screen of death.

If I instead install Kubuntu 10.10 from Live CD and update to 11.04 via the paket manager, everything works....as long as I don't hit "Yes" when the question "Do you want to remove unnecessary packages?" pops up after the upgrade to 11.04. If I do - black screen of death.

Even if I install Kubuntu 11.04 via the Alternate CD - installation completed successfully, reboot, black screen of death.

This does also count for the 32 Bit version.

I could now just simply install 10.10, upgrade and keep the "unnecessary" packages, but as this system will soon be my only system in use, I really need some stability.

Anybody here who can help me?

Text is loosely translated from german, so if you don't understand anything, please ask.

Thanks in advance.

[Enzephalograph]

Could this probably be caused by my Broadcom BCM4313 wlan device?

[sithlord48]

Could this probably be caused by my Broadcom BCM4313 wlan device?


no your wlan card is not causing this.

why do u think you need a properiatary driver? for most people the opensource driver is more then fine. (and for a 4200HD it works really good too)

whats in the list of packages that get removed?

how can this problem be embeded if you were running 11.04 before? even when you upgrade it replaces all your packages w/ natty versions..

a clean boot of 11.04 live does not work?

have you formated the drive when you install ? if not parts of the properiatary driver might still be around try use (sorry not at my ati machine)
/usr/share/ati/uninstall.sh --force (iirc thats the command)
it will force removal of any parts of the ati driver installed.

hopefully that helps a bit.

[footer]

I don't know if this is relevant or not ... But have you tried waiting for a bit after getting the 'black screen of death' ... to get the KDE login splash screen?

The reason I ask is because I've been battling some video driver wierdness (since upgrading to 11.04 on a perfectly working 10.10 system). I have an nVidia card.

I did an in-place upgrade from 10.10 to 11.04 and was having issues so just did a fresh install from Live CD and everything works again except, I have an almost exactly 3 minute and 15 second delay from grub to KDE splash login screen. I think my screen is blue though during that time (vs. black). I don't reboot often, not only because of this but also because I hate rebooting.

Anyway, good luck and I hope you get your problem resolved soon!

[Enzephalograph]

no your wlan card is not causing this.

Well, by now I'm pretty sure it was actually caused by the wlan card.
I installed Debian today just to test if it is just Kubuntu related - and right after
I installed the brcm80211 driver manually (because my wlan0 didn't exist), system crashed and after a restart guess what:
Black screen (of death).
I got suspicious because normally when X-Server crashes, you can still access command line.

So I researched a little bit and it seems that Broadcomm drivers were known to cause this problem, but the bug should have been fixed in the recent kernel.
(https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14716)
Well, for others this seems to work, for me not I guess, so I decided to install the proprietary driver from broadcom.
After working this out (http://wiki.debian.org/wl), I now have Wlan and no crashes so far. Gonna test that a little bit more tommorow.



why do u think you need a proprietary driver? for most people the opensource driver is more then fine. (and for a 4200HD it works really good too)

Something I wanted to install didn't work with the opensource driver. ;)



whats in the list of packages that get removed?

Sadly I have no record of this list. And as I'm currently running Debian, I'm doing my best to not recreate the error :X



how can this problem be embedded if you were running 11.04 before? even when you upgrade it replaces all your packages w/ natty versions..

Well, as I said, the updated 11.04 was running as long as I kept the packages



a clean boot of 11.04 live does not work?

Nope. Just black screen.



have you formated the drive when you install ? if not parts of the proprietary driver might still be around try use (sorry not at my ati machine)
/usr/share/ati/uninstall.sh --force (iirc thats the command)
it will force removal of any parts of the ati driver installed.

I did :)



hopefully that helps a bit.

Help is always appreciated, thanks :)



I don't know if this is relevant or not ... But have you tried waiting for a bit after getting the 'black screen of death' ... to get the KDE login splash screen?


Waited up to an hour. (main pc still working, so I browsed the web and forgot about the laptop....lol)



/edit:
After doing some more reading, I've came to the conclusion that this was actually the effect of two bugs.
First one occured after installing the proprietary driver for my video card, second one while I tried
to fix the first one.

First bug found here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1772710
Second one here: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14716