[SOLVED] Blank dark screen after installing ATI Proprietary Drivers (fglrx) in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

Having video and sound issues with Fedora 15, I decided to try out Natty on my HP Pavilion G4 1009tx. Surprisingly, sound and 3D effects ran great with Intel onboard graphics so I installed it onto the Hard drive. In all excitement, I decided to try out proprietary ATI drivers for the switchable dedicated AMD Radeon HD 6470M graphics. However, when I rebooted, it would not boot. It seems that plymouth crashes and system ends up with a black screen. So, I decided to remove fglrx and keep on using Intel card but it seems that I can’t even boot into recovery mode. So, I had to remove fglrx and make the system usable again using the Live CD and chroot. Here is how I did it.

Note: If you are trying to get the fglrx to work, you should look somewhere else. I just removed fglrx and decided not to use it (for now at least).

First, I booted into the Live Ubuntu Desktop. Then, I opened the terminal and created a directory for mounting everything:

sudo mkdir /mnt/root

Then I mounted the root partition.

sudo mount /dev/sda7 /mnt/root

Please note that my installation’s root partition is /dev/sda7. In your case, it can be something else. Since I have a separate home partition (/dev/sda8), I mounted it too, just in case. You can skip this if you don’t have a dedicated home partition.

sudo mount /dev/sda8 /mnt/root/home

You should also mount other drives if you have dedicated partitions for other directories (for /boot perhaps?).

Then, I mounted other required directories.

sudo mount -o bind /dev /mnt/root/dev
sudo mount -o bind /proc /mnt/root/proc
sudo mount -o bind /sys /mnt/root/sys

Then, I chrooted to the mounted root:

sudo chroot /mnt/root

Now, I got into the root of my installed Ubuntu. Then I just had to run the following to remove fglrx:

apt-get remove fglrx

UPDATE 1:
(ignore this, see UPDATE 2 below)
After upgrading xserver-xorg-video-all, xserver-xorg-video-ati and xserver-xorg-video-radeon, the screen went blank again after reboot. So, I had to downgrade the packages by downloading from repos. Here is how you can do it too (I have included the packages in an archive which you can download here, please note that you need an active Internet connection for the following):

dhclient
cd /tmp
tar xzvf ˜/Downloads/xserver-ati-old.tar.gz
dpkg -i xserver-xorg-video-radeon_6.14.0-0ubuntu4_i386.deb xserver-xorg-video-ati_6.14.0-0ubuntu4_i386.deb xserver-xorg-video-all_1%3a7.6+4ubuntu3_i386.deb

UPDATE 2:
This blank screen issue would still reappear once in a while and the laptop would get very hot over prolonged usage, so I decided to go for a slightly different solution. I removedxserver-xorg-video-radeon and xserver-xorg-video-ati, blacklisted the radeon module and disabled it via vgaswitcheroo. Here is how I did it:
Remove ATI Radeon drivers:

apt-get remove xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-radeon

Blacklist kernel module:
To disable kernel module, I opened the file /etc/modeprobe.d/blacklist.conf and add a line ‘blacklist radeon’. You can use nano to do this:

nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Ctrl+O to save and Ctrl+X to exit nano.
Re-enable kernel module after startup and switch the card off:
To do this, I just added two lines before the line ‘exit 0’ in /etc/rc.local (you can use nano for this too) so that the file looks like the following:

#!/bin/sh -e
#
# rc.local
#
# This script is executed at the end of each multiuser runlevel.
# Make sure that the script will "exit 0" on success or any other
# value on error.
#
# In order to enable or disable this script just change the execution
# bits.
#
# By default this script does nothing.

modprobe radeon
chown USERNAME /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

exit 0

In the file above, USERNAME is my login username. Don’t forget to replace USERNAME with your username before saving the file. (If you are not sure what your username is, just do this: ls /home/, you should see it in the name of the directory.)

When done, I just exited from the chrooted environment:

exit

Then, I unmounted everything:

sudo umount -a

(You’ll see some error messages, like device is busy, just ignore them)

Now, I am able to boot into the installed Ubuntu again. Hope this helps.

[HOWTO] Add/Change plymouth theme in Debian Squeeze Testing

If you are using Debian Squeeze, you can install plymouth and it will install some plymouth themes by default. You can list the installed themes by running the following command in the terminal:

/usr/sbin/plymouth-set-default-theme --list

If you wish to install a new theme and if the theme is meant for Ubuntu, you can’t directly install it in Debian testing. If you get a deb, you will either get a failed dependency error like the following or it will not work even if you manage to install it:

Error: Cannot install ‘plymouth-label’

If you have a deb, open it up with file-roller (archive manager) and extract the directory which is inside ./lib/plymouth/themes in the deb archive. If you have a tarball (or some other archive) with instructions, just extract the directory.

Then, just copy the directory to /usr/share/plymouth/themes

If the directory name contains any capital letters, get rid of them and change the name such that the directory name is in all-lower-case. Also, get rid of spaces and such in the directory name. Inside the theme directory, you will see a .plymouth file. Open it up in a text editor and change the paths in it to /usr/share/plymouth/themes instead of /lib/plymouth/themes. Save the file and the theme is installed.

Now, run the following to list the themes:

/usr/sbin/plymouth-set-default-theme --list

You should see the newly installed theme listed. To change the theme, just run the following as root:

/usr/sbin/plymouth-set-default-theme theme-name

To test it, use the plymouth-preview tool. To commit changes and rebuild initrd, use the following command as root:

update-initramfs -u

If everything goes well, the theme should be changed.

plymouth-preview, a tool to preview your plymouth theme

I have written a small shell script to preview plymouth themes. I have successfully tested it in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat and Debian Squeeze Testing. It should also work with other Linux distros. Please make sure you have installed the package plymouth-x11 (or equivalent) before using this script.

In Debian, you can install plymouth-x11 by executing the following command as root:

apt-get install plymouth-x11

For Ubuntu, use sudo in the beginning of the command.

Here is the script:

#!/bin/bash

## Preview Plymouth Splash ##
##      by _khAttAm_       ##
##    www.khattam.info     ##
##    License: GPL v3      ##

chk_root () {

  if [ ! $( id -u ) -eq 0 ]; then
    echo Must be run as root
    exit
  fi

}

chk_root

DURATION=$1

if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then
	DURATION=5
fi

plymouthd; plymouth --show-splash ; for ((I=0; I<$DURATION; I++)); do plymouth --update=test$I ; sleep 1; done; plymouth quit

Save the above script somewhere and run as root.

It accepts one command line argument, which specifies the number of seconds you wish to display the splash. The default value is 5, but you can change the script to alter the default value.

References:
http://brej.org/blog/?p=158

[HOWTO] Change Ubuntu Pink/Purple Plymouth Boot screen to any color you like

I am using Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat and have been using the default theme for quite some time. I was bored with the default boot screen and decided to change it. If you don’t like the purple color of Ubuntu, you can easily change the Desktop theme and wallpaper, but the Pink/Purple Ubuntu Plymouth boot splash is a little difficult to get rid of. You can install other available boot splash by installing other packages, but I like the default boot screen, and just wanted to change its color. To do that, I just cloned the boot screen and made some changes so that it looks like the following.

Here is how I did it. Fire up the terminal and get ready.

Make a copy of the plymouth theme:

sudo cp -R /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-logo /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-logo-nonpink

Edit the name and location information:

sudo gedit /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-logo-nonpink/ubuntu-logo.plymouth

I changed the name to “Ubuntu Logo NonPink” and changed the location of ImageDir and ScriptFile so that it looks like the following:

[Plymouth Theme]
Name=Ubuntu Logo NonPink
Description=A theme that features a blank background with a logo.
ModuleName=script

[script]

ImageDir=/lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-logo-nonpink ScriptFile=/lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-logo-nonpink/ubuntu-logo.script

Save the file and exit.

Edit the color in script:

sudo gedit /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-logo-nonpink/ubuntu-logo.script

Search for “Window.SetBackgroundTopColor” (without quotes) and change the 2 lines so that they look like the following:

Window.SetBackgroundTopColor (0.85, 0.85, 0.85);     # Nice colour on top of the screen fading to
Window.SetBackgroundBottomColor (0.75, 0.75, 0.75);  # an equally nice colour on the bottom

I have chosen these colors: #DADADA RGB: 217, 217, 217 and #C0C0C0 RGB: 192,192,192
You can choose any color you like. Find the RGB using gcolor2 (install this if you don’t have it installed) of the desired color and divide the RGB values with 256 to get the values to use.
Save the file and exit.

Edit the Ubuntu Logo and other images:
Install Gimp if you haven’t already done so and run the following:

 sudo gimp /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-logo-nonpink/ubuntu_logo.png

The white logo may not look good with the background above. You may change the color however you like. For my selection of background color, black would look great, so I just inverted colors (Colors>Invert).
Once done editing the image, save the file and quit Gimp.
Now, change the progress dots:

sudo gimp /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-logo-nonpink/progress_dot_on.png
sudo gimp /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-logo-nonpink/progress_dot_off.png

I just changed the mode to RGB (Image>Mode>RGB) and desaturated the image (Colors>Desaturate) and got nice gray dot for progress_dot_on. I made no changes to progress_dot_off.

Install the theme:
The theme is ready and can be installed using the following command:

sudo update-alternatives --install /lib/plymouth/themes/default.plymouth default.plymouth /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-logo-nonpink/ubuntu-logo.plymouth 100

Set the theme as default:
Once installed, it can be set as default using the command:

sudo update-alternatives --config default.plymouth

The above command lists all the installed themes as shown:

There are 2 choices for the alternative default.plymouth (providing /lib/plymouth/themes/default.plymouth).

  Selection    Path                                                            Priority   Status
------------------------------------------------------------
  0            /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-logo-nonpink/ubuntu-logo.plymouth    100       manual mode
* 1            /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-logo/ubuntu-logo.plymouth            100       manual mode

Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number:

Enter the number corresponding to the theme you want to use. In my case, it is “0”. So I entered 0 and pressed ENTER. In your case, it may be different.

Update Initial Boot Image
Now, you will need to run one more command to update the boot images and you are done.

sudo update-initramfs -u

Reboot and see the changed boot screen.

[SOLVED] “error: mountall Could not Connect to Plymouth”, “mountall main process (x) terminated with status 1”

I am using Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha on a system with Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L with Intel GMA 3100 onboard graphics. I upgraded to Lucid from Karmic Koala (9.10) and it was always showing these errors on boot:
“error: mountall Could not Connect to Plymouth”
“mountall main process (x) terminated with status 1”
Also, I could not experience Plymouth. I thought it was a problem with Plymouth and believed updates will fix it, but that did not happen till date. Today, I decided to fix it and went looking around for a fix and got it working.

I found this thread on Ubuntu Forums and was able to fix it by following it.
I checked by boot options and noticed that there was only “quiet” specified, and no “splash”. I added “splash” and it worked.

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