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Ubuntu 15.04

Radeon R9 380 GPU

I finally realized nvidia and Linux simply don't work well together, so today after a lot of research I switched to a Radeon card which is supposed to have much better support.

Booted into ubuntu OK, in low graphics mode.

I selected the proprietary driver and rebooted, and now can get no further than "Starting Version 219.

What now?

edit

OK, I tried all of the options from grub, the only change there is that in low-graphics mode it boots to a black screen with a flashing white cursor at the top left, but will not go past that.

Ctrl/Alt/F1, F2, etc does nothing at all.

Alt Tab, Ctrl/Alt/Del, Esc, Alt/F4... I'm not sure of all of the keys I tried, but I'm convinced it hangs when it boots, to the point that nothing from the keyboard is being registered.

Fortunately, I'm set up with a small Windows installation that I can choose from Grub, and just like with the Nvidia card I pulled out, it works with absolutely no problems at all - the new card is detected and the drivers downloaded and installed flawlessly and it is working perfectly.

So what gives with Linux? I've got ten years of dicking around with all of the Nvidia issues from multiple systems to get it working, so I'm pretty good at that - but based on all of the issues and general hatred for Nvidia from the linux community at large, I honestly expected a radeon card would at least get me to a desktop. But as this is my first experience with radeon/linux, I really have no clue how to go about getting it to work at all.

And I honestly don't think I can return a $250 video card because "it works fine in Windows but not in Linux."

Any assistance at all would be very helpful and greatly appreciated.

edit2 Gave up and tried reinstalling from the 15.04 iso (fortunately I learned to keep windows! )

It installed, but complained about "held packages"

Rebooted to a desktop just fine, but now no mouse or keyboard lol!

Recovery mode from grub also had no mouse or keyboard, but the keyboard works in grub!

Now I'm just doing a complete wipe and install from scratch. Fingers crossed.

Shouldn't there be an easier way to switch video cards?

edit lmfao!

Installing alongside windows 7 from the live cd results in it sitting at "creating ext4 file system" for 90 minutes. Rebooting at that point skips grub altogether and takes me to a purple screen with 5 orange dots and then nothing at all for 15 minutes. System is hung at that point.

The install error as it turns out is not a new problem,it is apparently from something called ubiquity, and no solutions are listed anywhere that I could find. Terminal will not run at all, and Rebooting does not show grub at all, so no way to get to windows to try and fix it.

I'm 6 his into this so far today, plus another 4 last night.

Would putting my nvidia card back in fix this? I hate to think so, because it worked fine in windows before ubuntu took away that option.

final update

OK, I finally got 14.04 to install, I'll just use my laptops for Windows since 15.04 removed it from our desktop. The new card is now working perfectly with the vesa driver. I had hoped for higher resolution, but so far it has not given any system problem errors, so it is definitely better than the nvidia.

1 Answer 1

-1

Solved

Using 14.04. Working perfectly now.

edit

My bad. Details of the solution:

When booting with AMD proprietary drivers on a new Radeon card, the system hangs at a screen saying "Starting Version 219"

There are quite a few posts about this issue, and a lot of conflicting answers, everything from "It is not an issue, it is only cosmetical" to "It is an Nvidia driver problem" to "just wait, it will go away" to "it is a display manager problem."

Since there was no way around it at that point (No response to keyboard at all) and after a total of 16 hours of trial and error along with a lot of cul-de-sacs of bad troubleshooting, and with no agreement about what is even causing it, finding a solution was simply not possible.

Wiping the entire system and installing 14.04 with the vesa driver removed the problem completely, satisfied most of the posted issues and problems related to this message, and has left my system working perfectly.

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  • Not sure how else to mark it as solved, and at this point I still can't accept my own answer. It was late and I had spent the entire day messing with it, I'm just glad everything is working now.
    – snurfle
    Jul 20, 2015 at 10:15
  • It says I can accept it in 12 hours; should I go through the exercise of copy/pasting the ordeal that I went through to get it working, or are the updates in the original post good enough?
    – snurfle
    Jul 20, 2015 at 12:06
  • Just cut-paste the "answer" from your question to the answer above, or you'll confuse the hell out of everyone as your question is not a question and the answer is not an answer... ;-)
    – Fabby
    Jul 21, 2015 at 9:30

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