login screen display problems

[Wes]

Greetings everybody,
First of all, let me say that I'm excited to be here, and am looking forward to playing around with Ubuntu. Being a new linux user, I probably won't be able to answer many questions, but I am hoping to use the experience of others to learn more so perhaps someday I can be a person who answers more questions than he asks.

Now for my issue,

I installed Kubuntu 5.10, and everything seemed to go smoothly. However, when I boot into Kubuntu, the graphical login screen is not readable. What appears is just a lot of vertical lines of colors, and no text or login box of any kind. It is almost as if the resolution settings are wrong. Since I cannot login, I do not know where to go in order to fix the problem. I was hoping that during the install it would automatically determine my video card, and set the correct resolution parameters .

I booted into recovery mode, and from the root prompt ran sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg. I went through and mostly accepted the defaults. My video card was determined correctly, and I specified my monitor size. However, I still run into the same display problems after I completed the reconfigure process.

I am really looking forward to taking Kubuntu for a spin. Any help you can provide to get me up and running would be greatly appreciated.

Just in case this info is important, I have an ATI 9200 SE video card, and a 19 inch CRT monitor. This topic was also posted in the Installation and Boot forum, as I was unsure where the best place to post it was. Thanks for your help!

[skoal]

Re: login screen display problems

Wes, you seem to be in a pickle of a dilemna there.  I remember at one time having those colored bars when X fires up.  It generally implies a framebuffer conflict with your card or a driver option.  Here are some things you can try:

1. Instead of using the LiveCD or rescue mode, when it boots up and you get all that colorful garbledy gook, just hit ctrl-alt-F1 and login.  Then, type 'sudo /etc/init.d/kdm stop.  That should kill your xserver.

2. Edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file directly using nano or vi.  The command would be something like this: sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

...now, the nitty gritty.  After each one of these items below (done in the order listed for testing), make the change, save the file, and then restart your X/KDM session with 'sudo /etc/init.d/kdm start'.  If it fails again, repeat from 1 and continue with the next item below...

3. Find out the actual Horizontal and Vertical sync values for your particular 19" monitor.  You might have your particular brand with those specs listed here already: http://www.monitorworld.com/monitors_home.html

For my 17" Compaq CRT, it looks like this for me:

Section "Monitor"
  HorizSync    28-92
  VertRefresh  50-120
  Identifier   "Monitor[0]"
  ModelName    "COMPAQ P700 COLOR MONITOR"
  Option       "DPMS"
  VendorName   "COMPAQ"
  [...]
EndSection

4. For your ATI card, I guess you would make sure under Section "Device" you have "ati" listed.  Don't use any of those ati binary frglx drivers just yet (if you already have).

5. Try out the "vesa" driver instead of using "ati" above in 4.

6. Remove any Option settings under Section "Device" (if present).

7. Also under Section "Device", if you are using an AGP card, then make sure your busID is set like so: BusID        "1:0:0"

...If you have a pcie card I'm not sure what that would be.

8. Under Section "Screen", check that DefaultDepth value, it should be either 16 or 24.

* If all else fails, attach (or post in quotes) your /var/log/Xorg.0.log file here.

9. One last thing you could try is edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and remove the 'splash' or 'usplash' thingy at the end of your kernel parameters. It would look something like this instead:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.12-10-686 root=/dev/sda2 ro quiet

...notice after 'ro quiet' a parameter is missing. I forgot what that was actually called.