black screen on several distros
 

putting linux on my hp dm4 notebook.

i just recently decided to give linux a try. first i tried mint 12 as it seemed to be the most appealing. i downloaded the torrent, burnt to dvd, loaded, and tried it out for a bit. i had issues loading it at first that i resloved by typing in 'nomodeset--' before starting up. ran fine from disk, wrote it on to my hard drive replacing windows. i intended mint 12 to be the ONLY os on my laptop. after restart, i got nothing. its a black screen. if i look closely, i can see it loaded in barely a shadow but not visible enough to work with. so i tried fedora 13 next. same thing. black screen. my laptop runs 64 bit systems, but i tried mint 12 with both 32 and 64 with same result. mint 12 runs fine in recovery mode. can anyone tell me what im missing here?

From recovery mode, look through the log files in the /var directory. Usually the syslog will show errors somewhere, and you can also usually check the Xorg.log file.

this was the easiest fix ever, but the most frustrating to figure out. on my laptop, after installing mint 12 from the live media disk it would start up with a black screen, but i could still hear the chime that indicated it had started. after searching through log files and digging through all the forums on the subject i could find, i fixed this problem by accident. for what ever reason, the fully installed mint 13 boots with the light dimmed all the way down. after adjusting the brightness up a few notches, i found that all was well. i have seen many many posts of this same issue. maybe its this easy for some of you also. this was the same issue, and the same fix for every OS i tried to run. mint 11 mint 12, fedora 13, and fedora 16. i havent tried fixing openSUSE yet, but im guessing its the same issue. who would have thunk?

As an aside, this is the nature of troubleshooting computers.

99% of the effort is in finding the trouble. Once you've found it, shooting it is almost always easy.