External Monitor not working DURING install

[Weed Ramen]

Hi,

I have downloaded Kubuntu 15.04 and am trying to install onto my desktop pc. I boot off a usb and the start screen splash appears just fine and has a list of options such as 'install kubuntu', 'boot off first hard disk' and 'Test memory' and a few more others. I click the install kubuntu command and the dash appears on the screen as it appears to load. Then suddenly the monitor stops recognising a signal. The computer is still running and has not turned off however.

My specs are listed below.

Monitor: Dell s2340l.
CPU: Xeon 1220v3 (has no integrated graphics, so I'm wondering if this is the problem as a video feed from the graphics card might not have the proper drivers to work during installation).
GPU: EVGA gtx 970
RAM: 8GB Kingston
SSD: samsung 850 EVO 250GB
Motherboard: MSI z97i AC ITX


I would appreciate any help someone can provide. In the mean time I will try other distros in case this is something specific to 15.04 - recommendations welcome.
Cheers.

 

[ryanvade]

Hello.

What happens if you boot with nomodeset?
F6 -> nomodeset *press space to enable it, arrow keys to navigate*

 

[Weed Ramen]

Hi,

Very sorry for the late reply. Nomodeset did the trick. Unfortunately I later ran into an NVIDIA driver nightmare for my GTX 970. I couldn't access the latest nvidia drivers through the command line for some reason, so I had to do it the old fashioned way of downloading it from nvidia and removing the old drivers and installing the new ones. Doing the ol' "lightdm stop" to remove the old drivers to reinstall the latest ones so that I could have a resolution other than 1024*768 didn't work compared to previous times when I've done this trick as it completely cut the video feed to the monitor. The solution was to be SSH'd in from another computer where I could continue installing the drivers.

In the end, I decided it was too much of a faff and I went to back using virtual machines as I used to do. A bit of googling around tells me Ubuntu versions 14.10 and above and all it's derivatives have similar issues with newer hardware and require the nomodeset technique. It's a bit disappointing as the hardware I have has been out for a while now, so if Canonical would like a greater number of users switching to linux they will have to try harder to able to cope with newer hardware more efficiently to make the switch painless. Perhaps better open source drivers.

Nonetheless, your help was greatly appreciated as it pretty much did trick if it wasn't for my driver mess.