On October 1, 2020 3:42:34 PM EDT, H agents@meddatainc.com wrote:
I now have an older laptop with a display problem. I installed Centos 7 on it in February and had to install the xorg-x11-drv-ati and evdev drivers because the docking station has an ATI Radeon card. Everything worked fine with a dual display setup. I probably after that ran a system update but did not reboot while in this office. Today, when I got to the office again for the first time in seven months it does not boot into the desktop but fails after displaying ”Started Light Display Manager” with a mouse pointer on one display that can be moved but no desktop at all. The keyboard works and I can start a terminal session.
If I remove the laptop from the docking station everything works as expected but not in the station, presumably because it now uses the docking station card. Futzing around I see that systemctl --failed lists nothing, nor did dmesg immediately suggest a reason. In the yum history I see that this driver was updated to 19.0.1-3 from the 19.0.1-2 that installed with. Yum downgrade to 19.0.1-2 did not change the issue. Nor has booting an older kernel helped so far.
Although when I remove quiet from the grub command line it seems to stop after ”Started Load CPU microcode update” following the ”Started Light Display Manager” already mentioned, I strongly suspect some issue with the graphics driver.
Since the computer boots and seems to run fine with the internal display when removed from the docking station it seems that there are no hardware issues in the unit itself. My understanding is that the ATI driver can be a problem and needs to match the kernel etc - perhaps there is something wrong here?
Any suggestions for how to attack this? I need to use it in the docking station and have no alternative. Thank you.
Researching this further, the issue seems to be with x11. I found that blindly typing my password to log into the system seems to log me in and launches the expected startup applications. Since there is no desktop on the display, I can start a CtrlAlt-F2 root session and can verify this by ps aux.
Looking at Xorg.0.log, I see an error message - when I do not log in as a regular user - ”failed to add fb -22” followed by ”modeset(0): failed to set mode: invalid argument”. This is presumably the point of failure in displaying the graphical desktop.
Again, this is a ATI Radeon card and occurred after ”some” yum update. I have not been able to revert to a previous working desktop yet, loading an older kernel does not help. I suspect it is some interaction between the kernel, the display driver and x11.
I found that after initially installing the x11 ATI driver I had also installed fglrx-x11 from elrepo I believe but can now not find it, nor whether there is an update available that might resolve my problem.
Any suggestions?