On October 2, 2020 12:24:06 PM EDT, H <agents at meddatainc.com> wrote: >On October 1, 2020 3:42:34 PM EDT, H <agents at 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? I should also have added that because the wikipages at elrepo.org are down, I cannot consult those...