Brand New HL8 Boot Issues

General
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I have a brand new freshly delivered fully burned in HL8 with Monitor, mouse, key board and network cable plugged in. When I power up the system I get the splash screen for the bois and then the Rocky Linux log on screen as expected. The Issue is when I enter the default password it tries to boot up and I loose HDMI signal to the monitor. It just sits at a blank screen. I have also run a network scan with Zenmap and I don’t see the HL8 on the network so I am unable to log on using the web interface either. I am not sure if this is the correct place to post this? Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks Linden

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Assumpions:

  • You don’t have a GPU installed
  • You know some basic Linux

One thing I would try is once you get the Rocky Graphical login screen, press Ctrl+Alt+F3 and see if you can get a TTY(terminal) log in. If you can log in via the terminal we can isolate something about the graphics drivers or main OS install. We can cat some logs and such.

The other tack would be to download and create a bootable USB for Rocky or some other distro. See if you can boot into a basic OS install you create yourself. If you can, it seems to point to something borked on the factory install, if you can’t you may have a hardware issue of some sort, or maybe a stray BIOS setting is wrong.

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Almost sounds like the resolution is going out of range of the monitor when logging in. If you repeatedly press the escape key during boot, you should be able to access the grub menu. There’s usually some options to boot into low graphic or rescue mode you could try as well.

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Thanks for your help I think we have a monitor issue. With Ctrl+Alt+F3 I can get in through the terminal and every thing appears normal except for the first 2 characters being are off left side of the screen out of view. I will see if I can set the networking to DHCP via terminal and then log in with Houston. Is this a viable approach is there a simple way to do this with rocky my limited linux back ground is all Debian based Mint and Ubuntu. Thanks for the help Linden

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Success thanks to your help!! I can log in to Houston now I changed the network setting to dhcp in terminal. Hope this helps any one else trying to connect a prehistoric monitor via HDMI in the future. At some point I will get a new monitor and try with that to verify the issue but unfortunately I only have the one monitor on hand.

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It sounds like you are fine running headless. If you still want to try to get the desktop environment working locally you could;

A) Try disabling Wayland
From TTY3

  • Open the file: sudo nano /etc/gdm/custom.conf
  • Look for the line that says #WaylandEnable=false and remove the # to uncomment it.
  • Save and exit (Ctrl+O, Enter, Ctrl+X).
  • Restart the display manager: sudo systemctl restart gdm (This will immediately try to reload the graphical login screen on TTY1).
  • Wait 10-15 seconds and see if you get the desktop login and try to log in again. If it doesn’t automatically go back to the login, hit Alt+F1 or Ctrl+Alt+F1 to see if you can find it. It could be on TTY2/F2 but probably TTY1.

B) Try Ryan’s GRUB Suggestion
This is a bit more brute force. From TTY3

  • Run: sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="video=1024x768@60"
  • Reboot the system: sudo reboot
  • Try to log in

There are ways to grep for EDID information and what resolution Wayland is trying to start in if you wanted to compare that to your expectation of your monitor’s capabilities, but the issue is probably between Wayland’s auto detect and your old monitor. If path A above works, and your monitor supports higher resolutions you’ll be able to bump up to them in the Settings. With Path B you have “hard coded” the kernel to use one specific resolution and you won’t be able to change it dynamically, only by changing the GRUB parameter. So you have to know a bit more of your monitor specs that it should support 1280x720, 1366x768, 1600x900, 1920x1080 or whatever.

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I plugged in a brand new LG monitor this afternoon and all works as advertised. Desk top came up with no issues. If it helps any one in the future the monitor that gave me all this grief was an old Sony Bravia. Thank you all for the help and support. Linden

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