Hi. I am a brand new user. Here is my situation: I am booting my PC from a Live USB stick. I have connected a Soyo Topaz S 24' monitor with VGA. When it starts up, I see everything until the desktop login environment appears, at which point my monitor says, "no signal." However, if I plug in another monitor and change the resolution to 800x600 once I login, I can then switch to the Soyo and switch the resolution to a higher setting. I am trying to avoid having to do this every time.

If I press tab at one of the splash screens, I get a command prompt with this "ubnkerm initrd=/ubinit file=/cdrom/pressed/custom.seed boot=casper quiet splash --". I am not sure what I am doing exactly, but I would appreciate if someone could give me some idea on how I can get the monitor recognized at startup, so that I don't have to switch my monitors every time.

I need to run the software that is on the USB stick because it is a secure desktop with some specialized applications.

Also, the USB stick I have shows up as blank when I plug it into the PC while running Windows 7 (this is probably supposed to happen, but like I said I am new.)

Thanks

The USB stick showing up as blank is a Windows thing - it doesn't know about the formats commonly used for Linux filesystems.

The blank screen at boot could be the video card or your monitor (or both). First thing I'd try is to add "nomodeset" (without the quotes) to the "ubnkern..." line before the double-dashes and then continue booting. If that lets you see the screen, we can go on from there.

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Hello and welcome to LQ.

What it looks like is that someone made this usb with a live usb installer. That is where the casper deal comes from.
Live installers usually use a windows format but if someone had two or more partitions on this then windows would only see the first (without some coaxing) On a simple live installer it would show files generally. Not a big deal here.

The video may be fixed by using a command line switch. You may or may not be able to access it easily. Each distro and some loaders have various ways of doing this. I'd suspect that forcing video size and maybe using FB framebuffer or vesa would fix this. Or as above.

We'd need to know the distro and how they made it for a better guess.

Not a great thing to do by the way. Video isn't really a supported hot swap.

Try this also. Pull the ac plug from the monitor and replace it in a few seconds. DON'T just turn the power off. I know you were thinking that.

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This worked! It started up and I was able to see the login window.

Adding nomodeset fixed it. But I just realized that now I can only get to 1024x768 resolution. The monitor should go up to 1920x1080

I see. Thanks for the update and solution. RockDoctor was on it.

I think that when you issue that option it forces you to edit config later in a different way and may limit how much you can change. That command is a result of a stupid linux issue that tried to unify video across loader and into OS. It hasn't really been a great help.

Should be easily online someplace how to edit video settings after that option. I know I had to find it. If this isn't answered by tomorrow I'll try to remember to look it up.

Hey Jefro,

Any luck on finding out how to change the video settings?

When using nomodeset, you only get standard Vesa modes. Unfortunately, 1920x1080 is not one of them. I had to use create the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf then reboot without the nomodeset parameter to get my monitor's full 1680x1050.

In your case, this requires being able to write to the USB stick and knowing which graphics driver to tell the Xwindow system to use, which, in turn, requires knowing what graphics card (and/or onboard graphics) you have. My system has an onboard Nvidia C78 (aka GeForce 9100) which let me use the nouveau driver. I've attached a copy of my xorg.conf file (as xorg.conf.txt). Modifying my file to use the appropriate Driver in the "Device" section, changing the "Preferred Mode" to 1920x1080, and adding "1920x1080" to "Modes" in the "Screen" section should give you a working configuration. Just copy the modified file to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and reboot.

If you can't write to the USB stick (or don't know what graphics driver your system is using), but can get to the graphics display without using nomodeset, there another way forward, using xrandr. I created the program xrandr_helper (attached as xrandr_helper.txt) to assist me in this process. Just change the permissions to make it executable and run it. xrandr_helper presents a gui that does everything needed to switch your monitor to the desired mode (assuming the monitor can handle it).

HTH

Attached Files

	xorg.conf.txt (1.9 KB, 19 views)
	xrandr_helper.txt (1.5 KB, 11 views)

-:-Edit or change video settings.-:-

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-c...card-settings/
http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/vidcard.htm

What distribution are you running; thecohnhead?

I just got back.

Before we get too far along we should know what you are using of you can tell. Things like LPS may be edited in a very round about way.

I don't know how to find that out. I know this is a Live USB, and I know this is supposed to be a secure desktop and it has some specialized software added to it.

One note - I updated my driver on Windows and now with nomodeset, it freezes when I start it up. It says "Hardware RNG device indoor not found." If I start the LIVE USB normally, it will start, but it goes to a blank screen again with no signal. If I go back to my previous monitor, it starts up just fine. I probably should not have updated the driver, but the monitor is not even displaying the correct resolution in Windows. The highest I can get it without some distortion of the screen is 1680x1050.

When I click ctrl-alt-f(1-8), it switches to some text displays, but I don't think there is a way to type on those because none of them seem to have a command prompt. I also am unable to save any settings once it is fully launched. So any passwords or display settings have to be redone every time.

To find out what distribution you are running open the terminal run this cmd and post the output for us.
Ctrl + F2 should give you a konsole in text mode only with a prompt:-

That can be remidied once we know what distro your running by editing the kernel line in Grub if necassary. That is if the distro is installed to the HDD not running on a usb pendrive.

I found this thread that talks about Hardware RNG device that is associated with a daemon.
Wait for our Guru to advise you on that RNG issue as I'm not sure about it.
http://cryptotronix.com/2014/08/28/tpm-rng/
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...pg/+bug/706011

If you edited the /etc/X11/xorg.conf and followed RockDoctor instruction in post #8 it should work for you.
If not you can always undo what you did by re-editing that file.

To find out what graphics card you have run:

I tried the Ctrl +F2 and could not get a command line or Terminal.

Here is what comes up:
Ctrl + Alt + F1 - I see the splash screen with "press TAB to edit options." Then there is text underneath "Starting Adaptive readahead daemon preload" and some other stuff. I can't type on this screen.
Ctrl + Alt + F2 - "Welcome to secure desktop" messages I can't type on this screen either.
Ctrl + Alt + F3-F6 - Blank screen with flashing cursor. No typing.
Ctrl + Alt + F7 - It looks like a list of all the boot processes and whether they were OK or FAIL. I can type on this screen, but it doesn't do anything. There is no prompt.
Ctrl + Alt + F8 - Takes me to the desktop which has Firefox and a very minimal settings app.

Not sure if this helps or not.

If you can't get to a command-line prompt or a terminal that makes me suspicious that something may be wrong with the .iso of that distribution.

Did you check the integrity of the .iso file before you put it on the usb stick?

Looking at this line:
I can't tell what distro this is, sorry.
And trying to figure out what distro it is w/o being able to verify it in command-line is madness, IMO:-

If Ctrl + Alt + F7 shows you a list of boot precesses try using the arrow keys and select one of the boot options and hit Enter. If it doesn't boot you into a desktop environment than I think the .iso could be corrupt.

If you can't boot into this distro you may as well go to distrowatch and choose another distribution that's stable and check the integrity of the .iso file before you place it onto a usb stick to boot it.

-::-Since your new to Linux I recommend you giving Linux Mint a try.-::-
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mint
http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

-::-You can use your Windows 7 os to create a bootable usb of Linux Mint 17.-::-
http://www.everydaylinuxuser.com/201...-mint-usb.html