[SOLVED] Fedora 18 fails to startup with 3.7.x kernel on lenovo G580 (black screen)

[Roelio]

I've installed Fedora 18 two weeks ago on my laptop (a Lenovo G580). The installation went smooth, but as soon as I did a yum update and rebooted, I got a black screen almost immediately (about 2 seconds) after selecting the new kernel from the grub menu. I think the system is starting up, but somehow nothing is shown on the screen, which makes it rather hard to see what is going on.

I definitely want a newer kernel, since I'm currently bugged by an issue in the driver of my wireless network card, which causes downloads to go terribly slow and triggers disconnects every few minutes.

I know it's probably insanely hard to guess what exactly is going wrong, but if someone could at least give me a hint on how I could prevent the screen from going black, that would be greatly appreciated! For examply, you could help me by giving hints at how I can show all info (in text mode) on the modules being loaded instead of the fedora logo which normally pops up during start up...

Thanks in advance!

[george_toolan]

What kind of GPU do you have and which driver did you install?

[Roelio]

The graphics card is an Intel HD graphics (integrated, don't know any more details, but can and will check it further).
As to the drivers, I think it's just the standard open source drivers. I know that for nvidia drivers there might be issues that are specific to either Nouveau or the closed binaries that nvidia, but am not aware of any such thing for the intel integrated graphics cards...

[PabloTwo]

There was recently an issue with a newer kernel causing the brightness level on laptops to be set to zero, causing an apparent "black screen". I don't know if the latest kernel(s) have this issue fixed or not, but you could try using the Fn+<brightness_up> keys on your G580 to check if that is the problem or not.

[Roelio]

I didn't know about that brightness bug, interesting thing to try out... The screen is the same shade of black it is when the laptop is being turned off, so I assume it's probably not related to the brightness. To be sure, I tried to use the trick to increase the brightness, but this doesn't seem to help...

Does anyone know how I can force a text mode startup rather than the graphical one with the fedora logo?

[PabloTwo]

To boot into console mode (runlevel 3), at the grub menu screen press the "e" key to edit the kernel boot line. That's the line that starts with "linux /vmlinuz.....". Add a SPACE and "3" (no quotes) at the end of the line. The line will most likely be wrapped and shown on two lines. Do NOT hit the ENTER key after the edit. Do hit CTRL-X or F10 to boot.

The edit is a "one time only" change and will not affect future boots.

[Roelio]

The console mode (runlevel 3) only shows the console after the boot is finished, not while it is busy (the fedora logo is still shown during startup). Even when waiting for several minutes, nothing shows up on my screen anymore.
Since the screen goes completely black (looks exactly like it's completely turned off, but computer is still switched on) during the boot, I'd like to see what would be shown in case the fedora logo would not appear (as in: notifications of all services that are loaded and if there's some kernel panic or other things going wrong then I'd like to know that as well).

Note that the screen also goes completely black for 1 second between the (graphical) grub selection screen and the fedora logo showing 'startup progress' when starting successfully with the 3.6.10 kernel.

[PabloTwo]

Perhaps I misunderstood you. If by "Fedora Logo" you mean the one that slowly fills as the OS loads, you can hit the ESC key to switch to text mode and see the console output (hopefully). If that's the case, you can't "change" anything as far as what mode to boot into (that should be done at the grub menu before boot up begins). The only alternative after booting is the hit the "CTRL-ALT-F2" key combo at the point you should get a graphical log-in screen, which should bring you to a console log-in screen.

But, if there is actually no video signal going to the monitor, you'll see nothing, no matter what.

[Roelio]

I feel a bit stupid now to admit that indeed the black screen was due to the previously mentioned brightness bug: when brightness level is 0 it looks completely black... And moreover my Fn+<Brightness> keys are only working within gnome after a login, not during startup... So I now can startup by waiting until I think the login screen is there, enter my password and then after a few seconds I can "magically" use the brightness buttons and see something on the screen :-)

The most annoying part is now the wireless: I can live with typing blindly my password and adjusting the brightness afterwards. For the wireless, even though no kernel issues are popping up anymore in this version, it is still very slow, so I might give the closed source driver for the BCM4313 a try and see whether that works.

[PabloTwo]

Here is a link to another thread with the laptop brightness issue. It has links to the bugzilla report on this issue and also you might try the suggestion in post# 8 of the thread for a fix.

[Roelio]

The proposed suggestion indeed works like a charm. Thanks for pointing it out :-)

As for the network, installing broadcom-wl and kmod-wl from RPM fusion solved the network performance...