Could this be issues with my video card?

[kingkwothe]

Hello!

I am running a system that I built about two months ago and it has 500 GB Seagate Barracuda HDD, ASRock MOBO (no onboard video), 8 GB G-Skill Ripjaw RAM, AMD Athlon II X3 2.9 GHz CPU, and (the big question) a Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5450. I tried to run a Lucid Puppy, Kubuntu, and Google Chrome OS from a thumbdrive and none of them worked. I tried to run Kubuntu from the CD and that did not work. I tried to install Kubuntu and that also did not work. I shrunk my (only) C:\ partition down about 30 GB (using Windows 7 Disk Manager), put the DVD in, and I get nothing. It will load the welcome screen where I have to option to install Kubuntu or bypass the disc and load Windows 7. If I choose to install Kubuntu, it acts like it is loading the installer, my HDMI on my moniter goes blank and my monitor says "No Signal Received." Then if I switch my monitor input over to the S-VGA setting, I get a plain blue screen. Nothing but blue, and that is where it sits. I have never installed Kubuntu or Linux on a computer before, but I ran Ubuntu and Chrome OS from a flash drive on my laptop with no problems, so I'm wondering if it isn't something with the components in my desktop.

[lmilano]

Re: Could this be issues with my video card?

Yeah, the problem is perhaps the graphics card. This chipset (for the HD 5450) is fairly recent, and the open source drivers have started to catch up. You can test drive the latest Kubuntu 11.04 beta. It is not yet ready for production use, but it has newer software. You could perhaps play a bit just on demo mode, and see if it works any better?

Welcome to the forum!
Leo

[kingkwothe]

Re: Could this be issues with my video card?

I thought that it may have been the graphics card. This build is great and has given me no problems to date, so I was a little bit disappointed when Lucid Lynx did not install.

I would go with the newest 11.04 version, but I am really skeptical about beta software. Is there no way for me to manually select an open source driver to install before I start the installation? Or a way for me to burn one into a new DVD?

Otherwise, how stable is 11.04 in beta form? I'm only attempting to have a dual-boot system because I use my PC for school, personal finances, and some novice music production, and I do not want to lose all of my information if I get a virus or something. It isn't very likely that I will get a virus because I'm fairly web-savvy, but, in my eyes, it never hurts to be prepared. I just am not sure if I want to deal with constantly updating and/or upgrading my backup OS to stay current, I figured if I installed the 10.10 version with LTS, I wouldn't have to upgrade for about another 2 years.

EDIT: Would I be better off going with newest version of Linux Mint with their new rolling updates schedule, or has all Linux programming switched to the rolling updates schedule?

[lmilano]

Re: Could this be issues with my video card?

Oh, sorry, I didn't notice this was in the Lucid (10.04) forum. You can try Maverick (10.10), then, it will be supported for 1 more year, and it is more recent.

No, 11.04 beta is not production grade. By "test drive", I meant to say that you can run it in Live Mode, without installing to the system. You can actually do that with 10.10 and see if it supports your video. It will use the open source drivers. If that works, then you can go to the menus and install (if you want) the AMD/ATI proprietary driver.

Open source drivers are part of a software stack (kernel, mesa, X, etc) and the best to upgrade them is to upgrade the distribution. Ubuntu hasn't embraced the rolling release thing, and I am not sure how stable the rolling Mint would be, though I think it is hot the kubuntu (KDE based) version.

HTH!

[claydoh]

Re: Could this be issues with my video card?

it is possible that the xorg in Lucid doesn't have proper support for your relatively new gpu, maybe even lacking good hdmi support.

I agree that giving 10.10 a live test is a good idea, just to see if the video at least works. I would go further and suggest trying 11.04 out the same way. It may not be 100% production ready, but this Beta 2 is ostensibly a Release Candidate as there is no RC this time out. It's xorg may have better support than 10.10 does. Luckily in either case, its all safe to try 'em out

[Guest]

Re: Could this be issues with my video card?

I thought that it may have been the graphics card.<snipped>

An option I didn't find suggested would be this: Given that you were sharp enough to select components for & construct your own system, why don't you just switch out the graphics card? It's highly probable you could find a used graphics card cheap, on eBay. If you do a little research and perhaps post questions here, you could probably discover whether cards you're considering are know to function correctly in the Kubuntu version you're running. And, if you still have problems after switching cards, then you know it's possible that your Nvidia card might have worked okay;i.e., that there's a problem elsewhere. After fixing the problem that's elsewhere, you could then try switching back to your originally preferred card.

Good luck!

[oshunluvr]

Re: Could this be issues with my video card?

Sorry guys but this card (at least the chip set) just isn't that new and is supported by the current drivers.

From Phoronix.com, Quote:

"For this Linux graphics benchmarking of the ATI Radeon HD 5450 we used the Nexuiz, Warsow, OpenArena, Lightsmark, Unigine Sanctuary, Unigine Tropics, and Unigine Heaven test profiles via the Phoronix Test Suite. With the ATI Radeon graphics cards we used the Catalyst 10.8 / fglrx 8.76.7 / OpenGL 4.0.10151 driver and on the NVIDIA side was their NVIDIA 256.53 driver release. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (x86_64) was the base operating system with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, X.Org Server 1.7.6, and an EXT4 file-system. All graphics cards were running at their stock speeds."

Bold added by me. The date of this article was Oct. 24th, 2010. I submit the correct driver was not being used is likely required in order for the HDMI port to work. Booting to recovery mode or to the console and then installing the ATI driver will probably work, or using a different connector until the driver is installed.