I have searched all over (on and off of SE) and found many similar problems to mine but nothing seems to actually help. Perhaps because I am running a different desktop environment.
I have a desktop machine running Ubuntu 18.04 with the Budgie environment installed (I added it later to reduce the memory footprint from Gnome) and an encrypted disk. It has been working fine for months, until yesterday.
Now, when I startup the computer, the encryption prompt is as normal. However, when it gets to the graphical login screen, the screen goes black and the monitor says "Out of Range" without other information.
I tried ctrl + alt + F1 to get to the console and then tried to run
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
It told me xserver-xorg was not installed. I suspect that is because of the budgie environment (but I'm still new to Ubuntu, so...you know).
I tried pressing "e" in grub and edit the "quiet splash" to each of the following:
- no splash
- radeon.modeset=0
- nomodeset
These changes seemed to simply stop the boot process.
I tried:
sudo apt upgrade
And that installed something (libsgutils2-2) which seems unrelated to graphics issues.
At this point, I am stuck and do not know the path forward. I do not have another monitor to test and I don't want to reinstall my drive.
Graphic grub works. When I press the power button on my computer while in the "Out of Range" state, I see a very simple graphic screen which I always see when shutting down cleanly.
Is there a way to say "Boot to 1024x767" or similar? Is there something else I should be doing?
Since I've not heard anything from anyone I thought though how to experiment in my situation. I hope this will help others with the same symptom.
I figured that the problem was something unique to my Ubuntu install or having the Budgie desktop environment (perhaps some update messed things up). So, I tested that assumption by creating and booting from a LiveUSB. The symptom was unchanged.
I then concluded that the problem that suddenly happened was my monitor. Somehow, the monitor would handle some graphics (text, graphic grub, etc.) but not the full desktop environment. Again, this just suddenly changed from one day to the next.
So, I bought a new monitor. Now, everything is fine.
The lesson is: A little experimentation can help eliminate incorrect assumptions.