Skip to main content

Ubuntu upgrade caused blank screen on my Acer Laptop

I have an Acer Aspire 4736 Laptop running ubuntu 10.10. I recently used update manager to upgrade to 11.04.
After upgrading and rebooting, I had a problem with the following symptoms:
  1. Acer's BIOS Splash screen showed up followed by GRUB OS selection menu.
  2. After that the laptop's screen turned purple and then blank.
  3. A few seconds later I could hear the welcome sound but the laptop screen was blank.
  4. I connected an external monitor via HDMI and the image came up on the external monitor
And so I scoured the net and came across this forum thread and realise that my laptop's LCD panel was showing an image alright but the backlight was off - confirmed this by squinting closely at my laptop's LCD panel.
I followed unknown47's advice and restarted and it worked. If you have an Acer Aspire laptop and have a similar problem, do this:
  1. Bootup ubuntu.
  2. Connect external monitor.
  3. Edit /etc/rc.local and add before exit 0:
    setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B=00
  4. Edit /etc/default/grub and change
    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT = "quiet splash"
    to
    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT = "quiet splash acpi_osi = Linux"
  5. Execute the command sudo update-grub2
  6. And restart your computer.

Comments

  1. Man, you really made my day. I had a lot of issues with my acer notebook. None of linux distros were working properly and for three days I've been frustated cause I really like linux. No ubuntu forum commands with similar problems as mine were able to help me with my issue, but you did. THANK YOU A LOT! Keep up the good work. Cheers from Brazil!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I also did everything, but the last command, saying to update the grub2 didn't work. It said something like the path was not found. My laptop came back to normal though. Thank ya!

    ReplyDelete
  3. excellent man,worked it...thank you so much....cheerrss

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thank you for this post. It is the easiest and clearest and works perfect. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment