I'm attempting to boot from the new Neon live image. The KDE background comes up, I see a 'getting started' sort of window, then the screen reverts to text mode with a rapidly blinking neon login cursor (actually not the cursor, but the entire text mode screen is rapidly blinking. Logging in with that is tricky, given that the keyboard only intermittently responds. But issuing either a 'startkde' or 'startx' command once logged in results in a 'display not set' sort of message. I had this problem once before and fixed it, but sadly can't remember what the fix was

Older Dell optiplex with integrate intel graphics - had Neon running on it before for several months. Tried the nomodtest option with no joy.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

Did you verify the checksums of your .iso image?

checksums are good.

I would start from the bios. Check your bios settings. Are you installing via legacy?

I have this exact same problem in a E5300 intel cpu with integrated intel graphics (82G33/G31). It always crashes a second or 2 after opening the graphical install and then goes to a blinking and almost unusable text mode login. I can sometimes get to a working text mode login by using a combination of the F6 options but it appears to be random., but startx always fails with some error.

My MOBO is an Asrock G31M-s and theres nothing related to UEFI or Secure boot in its BIOS. I have tried many times tih the User and the LTS user isos and it always fails.

Another thing that tried was to install Maui (since tis based on neon, even thou its gonna be discontinued) and after a correct installation i used the KDE Neon repos and did a full upgrade after which it got the exact same blinking error than the installation process have. (It looks like its related to the intel drivers but i cant boot with xforcevesa either because in that case the boot process just hangs completely even before reaching the graphical install window.)

Ok, it looks like I finally managed to solve this problem. Spent a couple of days trying different distros and configurations and a similar problem happened to me after installing OpenSusse tumbleweed; Maui, Netrunner (debian) and some other distro installed and worked out of the box but Neon kept failing even before the installation could start (it always crashed). The solution for me was to boot my installation media (a usb stick) and pause at the boot menu with the F6 key->Esc combination to edit the kernel line and remove the quiet splash part and replace it with "xforcevesa nomodeset" (without the quotes), then the live system boots without a problem (if it boots in text mode until the login part, just login with the neon user and when prompted for a password just hit enter and then just use startx to start the graphical server), just a little bit slow cause of the graphics settings. After that the installation worked as normal. After rebooting you have to edit the grub menu by pressing the 'e' key to add the "xforcevesa nomodeset" options in place of "quiet splash" at the "linux..." line, then boot by pressing F10 and Neon should boot to the desktop, once in the desktop just install the driver "xserver-xorg-video-intel-hwe-16.04" (it has to be this one because xserver-xorg-video-intel wont install unless neon-desktop, xorg, and a ton of other system packages gets uninstalled) ; then check that theres no an active xorg.conf in /etc/X11 because if there is is one that initializes the vesa driver, check also that /etc/default/grub has the default configuration (that is GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"). Update the grub if needed and then just reboot the system.


For me, Neon is working smoothly and fast now, as it should be (with the low graphics configuration it was working very slow and the xorg daemon was using a ton of the cpu). Why is this happening in so many new distros with intel graphics? Shouldn't the driver that i have to install manually be installed and used by default in the live system and during the installation process?.

My computer specs:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82G33/G31/P35/P31 Express DRAM Controller (rev 10)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82G33/G31 Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 10)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family PCI Express Port 1 (rev 01)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family PCI Express Port 2 (rev 01)
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 01)
00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 01)
00:1d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 01)
00:1d.3 USB controller: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 01)
00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev e1)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GB/GR (ICH7 Family) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family SATA Controller [IDE mode] (rev 01)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family SMBus Controller (rev 01)
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101/2/6E PCI Express Fast/Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 02)

fralex wrote:Ok, it looks like I finally managed to solve this problem. Spent a couple of days trying different distros and configurations and a similar problem happened to me after installing OpenSusse tumbleweed; Maui, Netrunner (debian) and some other distro installed and worked out of the box but Neon kept failing even before the installation could start (it always crashed). The solution for me was to boot my installation media (a usb stick) and pause at the boot menu with the F6 key->Esc combination to edit the kernel line and remove the quiet splash part and replace it with "xforcevesa nomodeset" (without the quotes), then the live system boots without a problem (if it boots in text mode until the login part, just login with the neon user and when prompted for a password just hit enter and then just use startx to start the graphical server), just a little bit slow cause of the graphics settings. After that the installation worked as normal. After rebooting you have to edit the grub menu by pressing the 'e' key to add the "xforcevesa nomodeset" options in place of "quiet splash" at the "linux..." line, then boot by pressing F10 and Neon should boot to the desktop, once in the desktop just install the driver "xserver-xorg-video-intel-hwe-16.04" (it has to be this one because xserver-xorg-video-intel wont install unless neon-desktop, xorg, and a ton of other system packages gets uninstalled) ; then check that theres no an active xorg.conf in /etc/X11 because if there is is one that initializes the vesa driver, check also that /etc/default/grub has the default configuration (that is GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"). Update the grub if needed and then just reboot the system.

Thanks for posting this because this is the only way i can boot any KDE Neon ISO image off a USB Drive from the last month since nouveau is not cooperating with my system config