Bypassing Video card

1st Official Post

    Hi all,

    Very new to the forum and Libreelec. Have a hardware problem which I do not know how to solve.

    Installed latest version of Libreelec on a very old laptop. It works fine some times but most time during booting I get the "Xorg failed to start" message. Now the problem is this: the laptop (an old sony vaio) had two cards, an integrated Intel and an external Nvidia. The second one is busted so the laptop now only works with the integrated Intel one.

    The problem is that most of the times the OS recognises the Nvidia one and halts. Sometimes though it recognises the Intel one, boots up fine and works perfectly. Intel card shows in the System Information too.

    The question is this, is there any way to force the system to only look for the Intel card and not the Nvidia one? Is there a config file I can tweak to this end?

    Thanks,

    George

    The laptop is old.

    The CPU is an Intel Core i5-2450M and the GPUs are

    Intel HD Graphics 3000 (integrated) and the external an AMD Radeon HD 6470M. Sorry not Nvidia as written above.

    The thing is that once in a while the system boots correctly and works fine with the Intel card. But not always.

    thanks,

    G.

    • Official Post

    Hardware of roughly 10 yrs old... Support will stop at some point. :whistling:

    My somewhat newer Broadwell laptop also sometimes slips up when running LibreELEC, it also has some Intel/AMD combo solution. Honestly, I typically run Kodi in Ubuntu 20.04, which works just as well.

    Perhaps you can find something in your laptop's BIOS to select or disable one or the other internal graphics?

    • Official Post
    Code
    echo "nvidia" > /storage/.config/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
reboot

    ^ It's about 5-years since I used an nvidia card so I forget the driver/module name, but assuming it is "nvidia" this will blacklist the driver and prevent it from being loaded at boot time, which should allow the Intel card to be detected by Xorg. In the current state where the nvidia card is sometimes seen first you might need to reboot a few times to have the GUI active (on the Intel card) to enable SSH and get access.

    Quote from Klojum

    Hardware of roughly 10 yrs old... Support will stop at some point. :whistling:

    My somewhat newer Broadwell laptop also sometimes slips up when running LibreELEC, it also has some Intel/AMD combo solution. Honestly, I typically run Kodi in Ubuntu 20.04, which works just as well.

    Perhaps you can find something in your laptop's BIOS to select or disable one or the other internal graphics?

    Thanks, unfrotunately BIOS is too basic (Sony) so no options there. Last resort would be the Ubuntu full installation on laptop indeed.

    Graphics drivers are build into the kernel and cannot be blacklisted

    You can modify the udev rules:

    Code
    cp /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/97-xorg.rules /storage/.config/udev.rules.d/

    Remove the unwanted graphics driver line with nano /storage/.config/udev.rules.d/97-xorg.rules - in this case "radeon".