Get a basic GUI when system boots to black screen.

[glennzo]

Often times when you've finished your install of Fedora and reboot you are greeted with nothing but a black screen, sometimes not even a prompt of any sort. The system seems to just sit there waiting for your next move. A critical issue to new users, this can often times be fairly easily resolved. Here's what I suggest:

Reboot the computer. When you see the boot menu select Fedora with the arrow keys. Once Fedora is highlighted press e to edit. Arrow down to the line that looks similar to this:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686 ro root=UUID=67a30fd4-7022-4ebe-8f9d-07cd2aabd732 rhgb quiet

and press e to edit this line. Move to the end of the line. Delete rhgb and quiet, add a space and the number 3 so that the line now looks like this:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686 ro root=UUID=67a30fd4-7022-4ebe-8f9d-07cd2aabd732 3

Press enter and press b to boot. This will boot the system into runlevel 3 and you will get a command prompt. Log in as root with root password. Backup the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf by typing

cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.old

Now edit the file:

nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Look for this section

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Videocard0"
	Driver      "intel"
EndSection

Change Driver "intel" (or whatever yours says) to Driver "vesa". Save and exit nano. (The key commands are at the bottom of the editor). Type logout to log out of the root shell. Log in as your regular user. Type startx and see if you get the GUI.

Now that you (should) have a very basic graphical user interface that you can work with, backup the working /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Once that's saved you can try to tweak the interface to your liking in terms of correct drivers, screen resolution, etc. If things go badly you can always repeat the process, this time just to copy the known working configuration over the broken one.

[Shadowmeph]

I think that you have a spelling mistake

cp /etc/X11/corg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.old

isnt corg.conf actually supposed to be xorg.conf? lol and thank you for the guide I am going to try and use this to hopfully get my system to boot

[glennzo]

Originally Posted by Shadowmeph

I think that you have a spelling mistake isnt corg.conf actually supposed to be xorg.conf? lol and thank you for the guide I am going to try and use this to hopfully get my system to boot

Spelling mistake? Me? Unheard of

Thank you. You are so correct. And the error is corrected.

[Shadowmeph]

Originally Posted by glennzo

Spelling mistake? Me? Unheard of

Thank you. You are so correct. And the error is corrected.

the funny thing is when I noticed it I was typing out the word spelling and I noticed that I had spelled spelling speling and lol

edit
on a different note I did this but I didn't change the xorg.conf and just rebooted it seems to have cure my problem.. which to me is strange lol

[zcarriger]

Awesome tip, that will really come in handy for the times when, for some reason (perhaps the current phase of the moon?) my x.org decides to bork out.

I've always wondered how to edit X.org, Thankx

[JaredKaragen]

Is it me?

In FC10, I can find no such "xorg.conf" in the directory /etc/X11/

Because of this I have had to do a fresh install about 5 times now...

[glennzo]

Originally Posted by JaredKaragen

Is it me?

In FC10, I can find no such "xorg.conf" in the directory /etc/X11/

Because of this I have had to do a fresh install about 5 times now...

There is no default xorg.conf in Fedora 10. Open a terminal and type su. Enter the password and then type system-config-display --reconfig and one will be created.

[diedo]

thanks this is really helps i faced this problem with my nvidia vga card no i can do some settings i need to get it work

[JaredKaragen]

Originally Posted by glennzo

There is no default xorg.conf in Fedora 10. Open a terminal and type su. Enter the password and then type system-config-display --reconfig and one will be created.

bash: system-config-display: command not found
[root@dj JaredKaragen]#

[glennzo]

You need to run it as root or with sudo. If that doesn't work try /usr/bin/system-config-display --reconfig.

[radlure]

Originally Posted by glennzo

You need to run it as root or with sudo. If that doesn't work try /usr/bin/system-config-display --reconfig.

Running the livecd F10x86_64 on a HP pavilion dv6707us I couldn't get that command recognized either.
I'll try again with the full path command. I also noticed that the livecd boot stalls unless I press a key on the keyboard. I've seen that behavior on the latest ubuntu release-maybe it's a kernel bug?
The iso passed the sha1sum check.

[glennzo]

Not to sure about the live cd. Try updating the slocate database first

su
(password)
updatedb
locate system-config-display

That should tell you where it's hiding on the Live CD if it's there at all.

[zackf]

I did notice that on my install of F10 in a virtual machine system-config-display did not install, I had to do

yum install system-config-display

first

[radlure]

Originally Posted by glennzo

Not to sure about the live cd. Try updating the slocate database first

su
(password)
updatedb
locate system-config-display

That should tell you where it's hiding on the Live CD if it's there at all.

Thanks glennzo, I did that prior to posting-it didn't show up.
I'll keep trying to get it working as I have time. Thanks again.

Later: I checked the cd using the integrity check from the boot menu-the cd is ok but there is no Xserver nor any simple way to get one

[matthewphiong]

I've once get into this problem...

What I do is while booted into level 3 (command prompt), I delete the xorg.conf file and restart X server

rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf
startx

matt