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I installed Ubuntu 11.10 today. After the reboot I selected Ubuntu and it kept hanging at the purple screen. No error message was shown.

The liveCD went fine and the installation was successful. I tried recovery mode but it Still didn't work

Please Help! Any help will be appreciated

Specs: ASUS F81Se, Windows 7 Home Premium, ATI RADEON 512mb Graphics card, 4gb ram

7 Answers 7

17

Well AMD Radeon graphics cards (especially the recent ones) are difficult to use with Linux. It happens exactly the same with my AMD Radeon HD6850, until I install the FGLRX proprietary driver package.

To install it, you must go into the Recovery Mode. To do that, hold SHIFT at startup so the GRUB menu is displayed, choose Ubuntu Recovery Mode after that. Choose to mount the disk as read/write, then drop to the root shell with networking (this is very important).

Then do the following commands once you're dropped to the root shell:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade   
sudo apt-get install fglrx    
sudo aticonfig --initial
sudo reboot

If everything worked, you should be fine and see the desktop after this.

2
8

There is a Way Easier Fix...

Just enter "e" after GRUB loads

Then delete $linuxgfxmode from like the 3rd or 4th line down and replace with nomodeset

Winner almost everytime on 11.10 and 12.xx apparently.

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  • 1
    I changed it into nolapic and it worked a long time ago Apr 15, 2012 at 5:00
  • 4
    That worked for me too. Just to clarify, the full line in my version is: "gfxmode $linuxgfxmode". I replaced it with "gfxmode nomodeset" Mar 16, 2013 at 23:35
  • 8
    Could somebody explain, what this change means? Sep 24, 2013 at 13:33
  • 1
    Didn't try this solution yet, but another post seems fixed the problem for me. One may resort to: askubuntu.com/questions/851432/…
    – Ingch
    Apr 12, 2019 at 8:17
  • In the end, I found it is the solution posted here finally solved my problem, not the link I posted above...
    – Ingch
    Apr 19, 2019 at 14:31
1

ATI RADEON 512mb Graphics card, (ati) xorg problem.

I have a hd 5670 - I did the following:

  • go to recovery mode
  • sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf
  • reboot.

If instead it works for you, do the following - backup of your xorg with:

  • sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak
  • install fglrx drivers from amd website
0
1

I had the same problem ,but all of the above tips didn't work. Then I realized the graphics driver was in switchable graphics mode.

When i changed the graphics driver to UMA mode in the BIOS, it worked.

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I have tried all of the above and none of them worked. I was able to fix it by pressing Shift and F3 at the purple screen. This will bring you to the command prompt. Log in and type:

sudo service lightdm start

If this worked you should be brought the login page.

1
  • Worked for me. Easy fix :) Apr 5, 2017 at 15:37
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I had this problem, and found that in my case it had a completely different cause. I noticed a faint clicking noise from my hard disk. I have had severe disk failures twice before, so I started to panic, knowing that it might be a symptom of disk failure, or incipient disk failure. I searched for possible causes of disk clicking. There is discussion about this all over the web, with people opening up their hard disks, etc. (Don't do it!) My computer is a desktop and has never been dropped or suffered any trauma, and it is powered through a good UPS, so it should not have suffered any power surges. It turns out that one possible cause of disk clicking is that the disk is not getting enough power. In my case, all I had to do was to power down normally, disconnect the power, press the power button once to remove any residual power on the MG. Then I connected my HD to a different cable from the power supply. Once I rebooted, everything was back to normal.

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I installed 19.10 and both monitors showed a purple screen upon boot.

BUT I later realized that I had a third output from my GPU going to a monitor that I've had some problems with in the past. (it doesn't always "detect" the input).

Apparently that monitor was being assigned as primary and the default behavior for secondary monitors at login-time is to show a blank purple screen.

Once I unplugged that HDMI cable, an actual login screen popped up on one of the other monitors and I was good to go.

If anyone comes across a purple screen at boot following a fresh 19.10 install, it might be worth trying some of the other GPU outputs or unplugging anything extra that might be plugged in.

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