No display when using Mageia 2 live on Toshiba L10

[mailedfist]

I've got a number of Toshiba Satellite Pro L10 laptops on which I plan to use Mageia hosting an immutable VM running Windows XP.

I was going to use Mageia 1, but as Mageia 2 has just come out I thought I'd be better being current. So, I thought I'd try using the live CD. However, it gets as far as the first Mageia splash screen and then turns the display off - completely.Ctrl Alt F keys don't even do anything. The on-board video is Intel, so I wasn't expecting anything like this. Is this unique to L10s or is anybody else having problems with laptops (it could be switching to the external monitor connector - need to find a VGA lead to find out as the machine I'm typing on uses DVI)?

[doktor5000]

Which driver does it use exactly? Please post the output of

Code: Select all

grep -i driver /var/log/Xorg.0.log

You could also have a look in that file, but first you'd need a possibility to have a display when the live session is running.
Because the way you describe it, would be quite hard to debug

Maybe just try a quick installation for the dualarch cd and check if the problem persists?

[mailedfist]

As my first step was to dd the whole drive before I start meddling to virtualise it, and I couldn't get Mageia 2 to do so because of no display, I thought I'd try another well known distro's live CD. That gives me a display (but I hate the desktop - why would anyone want to have to start pressing ctrl and alt keys to get a terminal!).
Anyway, it allows me to do the grep, and it appears that the XOrg 11.0 Intel i810 driver is what it uses to good effect. I'll need to work out how to enable wireless on said distro, as I've run out of physical connections on the hub, if it is necessary to post the whole grep output.

[doktor5000]

Well, the output of the other distro is no really important, only for comparisons. We'd need to have the same for Mageia

[mailedfist]

OK. I'll try and find that VGA lead then to see whether it is just that it isn't using the laptop's own display. As you say, if there's no display at all then it will be a tad tricky to debug. I don't suppose I can rsh or vnc or something similar to a machine just running "live", can I?

[mailedfist]

There is something about these laptops' hardware that the live CD really doesn't like.

Plugging an external monitor in gets me a display but it takes ages to boot and then freezes after logging in. I'm just trying Mageia 1 live.

[mailedfist]

Display works with Mageia 1 live but it still freezes before getting the desktop up and running. Time to download the DVD ISO and try a proper install I think.

[doktor5000]

Just read https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_2_Err ... rd_drivers before you install.

[mailedfist]

Thanks for the suggestions.

Unfortunately, the F6 option for Intel didn't help with the live CD (the directions here are a bit unclear anyway - is the issue with laptops that have both ATI/AMD and Intel?, or Intel on its own?) but installing from DVD has yielded a working system. I didn't have to enable any non-free repos to get to this point.

However, it does still seem that the Intel video is causing some problems. All is fine for a while, and VirtualBox runs nicely. However, on switching between applications the window manager will suddenly die - the apps themselves are still there, and things like the file menu work, but the window close, resize, etc, disappear and the tool bar is gone. There are a large number drm:intel_prepare_page_flip error messages occurring and these seem to get more frequent just before window management is lost.

There seems to be a lot on the web about these errors and the suggestion is that KDE desktop effects precipitate them, yet the cause is a bug in the kernel. I've seen it suggested for other distros that the problem does not occur with compiz, so am turning 3D effects on now to see whether it helps.

[mailedfist]

compiz doesn't make a ha'porth of difference.

[Trio3b]

For what it's worth, I have a Toshiba A305 laptop with Intel Mobile 4 graphics that just will not work with PCLinuxOS 2012. Random black screens and getting bumped off graphical terminal onto other console terminals ( which appear to be blackscreens)

Tried Mageia1 and 2, Mandriva2011, PCLOS 2011 and 2012 , Linuxmint 10 and 12 but same problem.

The only thing I narrowed it down to was:

1. What all these have in common is xorg-server version is >1.6.5. Any distro with version older than that runs fine. Currently PCLOS 2010 with xorg-xserver 1.6.5 running fine.

2. You are correct in that there may be a hdwr issue . My RTC battery is going out and in addition to not keeping time, it's possible that settings in BIOS for external display are being. futzed causing graphics to freak out. Am ordering a new battery and will see if that fixes issue but I'm leaning toward #1.

Hope this helps

[mailedfist]

Changing the graphics setup to VESA seems to resolve the problem (I say seems because I've only been running in that mode for a couple of hours so it is not completely conclusive) and also eliminates the drm:intel_prepare_page_flip errors.

So, as Trio3b says, it looks like this is a feature/issue in the Xorg intel drivers. In my particular use case, I may be able to get away with leaving the graphics setup on VESA as I don't need 3D effects or other trick graphics features. I'll see hopw it goes.

[marja]

This could be the same bug https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6077