Ubuntu – Black screen after installing hardware support

12.04graphicsupdate-managervmware-player

I'm using Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS on my VMware Player. Update Manager popped up this morning with a bunch of updates and I installed them and restarted the OS – I didn't face any problems at all. But I remembered that the Update Manager said "New hardware support is available" on the top, and had a button to install the "hardware support". So I started Update Manager again and saw the same message and button. I clicked on that button and after it installed, I restarted the OS using the "Restart Now" button. Upon restart, the login screen showed up, and after I logged in by entering my password, the screen became completely BLACK. I waited for several minutes, but nothing happened.

After a bit of searching the Internet, I came to know that I can access the terminal from the login screen itself, so I restarted Ubuntu by resetting VMware Player and when the login screen came up, I clicked CTRL + ALT + F1 and a terminal program came up on the screen. I am unsure as to what I should do now. Please help.

By the way, I just remembered – when I clicked on the Install button for the hardware support, I saw a message that said that some graphics thing is no longer going to be maintained starting 8/7/2014 and a new graphics driver or something is the new hardware support.


Best Answer

Install the driver package using the command:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-radeon

If it is already installed, then purge and reinstall:

sudo apt-get --purge autoremove xserver-xorg-video-radeon \
&& sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-radeon

You might need to reboot your system for the changes to take effect. (You can reboot from the command line issuing sudo reboot.)