When I rebooted my computer into Fedora this morning, it’s not talking to my right monitor. I don’t think it’s a hardware issue, because the BIOS sees both monitors, but when it boots, the monitor says it’s not getting a signal. When I go into settings to look at the display(s), the OS thinks that it only has one monitor. Any ideas?
[Afternoon update]
Apparently it was due to a kernel update. I backed up to the previous kernel and it seems to be working now.
[November 4th update]
Well, I’ve updated kernels several times, and this weekend I upgraded from Fedora 40 to Fedora 41. The problem persists. The OS is clearly having trouble seeing the second monitor. Do I need to replace the video card? How should I diagnose this?
[Bumped]
This is the sort of thing that happens after an update, either a library change or a new kernel module. Does the problem persist when booting to an earlier kernel?
No, it cleared up when I went to the previous kernel. If I have to reboot, I’ll do it manually with that kernel until there’s another kernel update (they occur quite often), and hopefully the next one will fix the issue.
About the slow boot, I’d be worried about a hardware issue, possibly bad sectors in the EFI partition. You might want to boot into a diagnostic thumb drive like parted magic. There may be some free alternatives, or even a separate fedora drive with SU enabled utilities. Then you could do a deep dive into the health of all the partitions. After that, Boot Repair might have some ideas.
Makes sense.
A lot depends how he’s getting into the bios. If it’s direct via a keyboard press (ESC, F2, etc.), it MIGHT, but just might, be independent of a boot drive. I say might because these days all sorts of weird things happen on power up that seems to be different for different computers. Gone are the days of the good old white boxes, where the motherboard just talks to the keyboard and the monitor if you push the bios key. If he gets into the bios via the grub menu, then a boot issue is definitely in play.
Unrelated old man rant…
Ubuntu finally removed LDAP protocol support for CUPS based printer drivers. Along with the replacement of inetd with systemd all my favorite Linux hacks are slowly but surely disappearing.
Is it better? Or just different?
Pixy over at Ace posted this fun issue with WD SSDs:
https://hothardware.com/news/windows-11-24h2-wd-ssd-bsod
Now that’s BSOD, but who knows what it does to Linux.
Rolls eyes.
Point taken. It could be that Fedora has no ability (as yet) to take advantage of an NVMe cache and so disables or never enables the feature and has to go to non-volatile reads until enough of the O/S is running to use main memory as a disk cache? Be interesting to research the topic.
Do I need to replace the video card? How should I diagnose this?
I’d start with the Fedora Forums. If you don’t see a logical match there for your problem already, post a query. Does sounds like a display driver issue to me. Hopefully they didn’t drop support for your video card.
Maybe it’s something you can fix with an insmod or a kernel recompile if you are up for that. Good Luck.
Simply for comparison purposes: I’m one version behind vis-a-vis Long Term Support (LTS) using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS under a VM. I’ve been running now for over two years largely without issue. I did experience one problem with an Ubuntu “upgrade” at one point about a year ago that hosed my display but it got fixed with an corresponding update to the Guest Host utilities under my VM. Nothing weird since. I typically stage upgrades by taking a snapshot of the working O/S before doing them. That way I can always roll back anything that breaks. Sounds like you have done similar. Absolutely key when working with Fedora I’d say…
After doing a Brave search, this seems to happen to somebody with just about every Fedora release, but I don’t see anything specific about 41. As David suggests, Fedora forums might be helpful, but also check if there are forums related to your video card. What card is it? Nvidia always seems to have a love/hate relationship with Linux, I’m afraid. In Ubuntu, there’s a mechanism to report a bug directly to Canonical, and I’ve had good luck on their responses in several cases. Does Red Hat have a similar function?
However, you could wait for just one more release, because Douglas Adams assured us that 42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything.
I don’t think it’s a 41 problem. It was happening with the last few kernels of 40 as well. I was hoping that 41 would fix finally fix it, but it didn’t. I’ve posted at Fedora Forum, but not gotten a response yet.