Laptop boot - lid closed - no display

[Andrew Bruce]

Hi folks,

I have a laptop (Compaq N800c) running Fedora Core 4 (although I've had this problem on earlier FC/Redhat Linuxes).

Problem:

Boot the laptop with the lid open - everything works fine.

Boot the laptop with the lod closed, I get no display (no points for any solutions saying, "Try opening the lid!" ;-)

The screen is blank, regardless of using X or text console (i.e. ctrl-alt-F doesn't help), and all I can do is reboot.

I guess this is something to do with ACPI (no APM here), but I don't know what it is!

I've lived with the 'effect' for some time now (since Redhat 9), but I wondered if anyone here had seen something similar.

Attached is my xorg.conf file (comments edited out).

As an aside; when I boot with the lid open, everything works fine, including the lid switch (display off when I close the lid, back on when I open it).

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Regards,

Andy Bruce

[Ivan Ferreira]

When you get the grub prompt, press any key to stop the auto boot, then select the linux menu option, and press the following keys:

a

type:

nofb

and then press ENTER.

You will be adding the nofb option to the kernel, before booting. Some LCD displays have problems and can be solved with this option.

If that works, you need to add the option in /boot/grub/grub.conf.

[Andrew Bruce]

Hi Ivan,

Unfortunately, I already tried the nofb option but without success!

For what it's worth, the problem seems to happen even if I boot into single user mode (i.e. none of the runlevels 2+ are responsible), so I suspect it must be down at either the kernel or driver level...

Regards,

Andy Bruce

ps Just in case, I've attached my GRUB config...