After Xorg update I have a black screen

Question

I have Ubuntu 12.10, my video card is Amd HD Radeon 7670M, and i have installed it's driver. It worked perfectly untill today ,when i made this updates:

*Important security updates:

1.Common files used by various X servers(xserver-common)

2.Xorg X server-core server(xserver-xorg-core)

*Other updates(LP-PPA-webupd8team-java)

1.Oracle Java(TM) Development kit (JDK) 7 (oracle-java7-installer)

2.Oracle JDK7 Installer meta package(oracle-JDK7-installer)

Now, it loads GRUB, whatever I chose i get a purple screen , blocked, with the load bar and that's it. Nothing happens. Please help me if there is something to fix this,if nothing works I will just reinstall Ubuntu, but i have a lot of file and programs and i don't want to really do this. Thank you.

Answer 1

I had this issue too yesterday. I had AMD Catalyst 13.1 installed. In addition, I followed instructions at BinaryDriverHowto/ATI when installing.

I booted normally (not recovery) with the nomodeset kernel option (see the "Black/purple screen after you boot Ubuntu for the first time" section of the top answer to "My computer boots to a black screen, what options do I have to fix it?" on how to do this) and was dropped straight into tty1.

There, I uninstalled fglrx by running the following commands:

sudo sh /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh 
sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx fglrx_* fglrx-amdcccle* fglrx-dev* 
sudo reboot

This should force your notebook to use the open source RadeonDriver, and solve the issue.

As a side note, my computer rebooted fine, and I immediately re-downloaded and re-installed (same procedure) the same driver (performance was excellent with 13.1). So far no issues yet.

Answer 2

This sounds like a problem with the AMD fglrx driver. Enter recovery mode. (Select booting it at the grub prompt.) Then enter the X fallback mode. Now you should be able to remove fglrx to get your graphical environment back.

To get proprietary drivers working again, try installing different versions of the fglrx driver or downloading the appropriate driver from AMD's website.