First off, here's my computer's processor and video: AMD A10-8700P Radeon R6, 10 Compute Cores 4C+6G × 4 ; Gallium 0.4 on AMD CARRIZO (DRM 3.1.0, LLVM 3.8.0)
The computer model is an HP Pavilion 15
The Ubuntu version is 16.04 LTS
The problem: the computer starts up just fine but the screen is black; even though the screen is black I can hear the drum sound prompting me to log in. To recover from this issue I just press F10 then cursor down twice, press return, and then cursor once to the left, then hit enter to restart. Obviously this means that I have figured out that although the screen is black the operating system is successfully running the window and desktop environment! Anyway, when the computer restarts all is well with the screen and I have a fully functional system. Sometimes, though, I have to restart again because the screen starts to flicker. After a second restart, though, this problem goes away. All in all, I'm very happy with my OS and computer but I'd like to eliminate this problem.
What I've tried: After looking things up in the forums I've tried: 1) using xdiagnose (this was when I didn't realize that actually xwindows was working properly it's just that the video wasn't working) 2) reading the boot log (in which no error messages appear) 3) reading various other logs where the OS records error messages but they are empty 4) upgrading the kernel (some forum posts in the past have suggested various kernel versions for this particular grpahics and CPU so I tried them all!) 5) reinstalling the OS.
What I suspect: It could be a video driver problem or a problem with the display. I'm leaning more in the direction of the video driver because although the screen is black it is a "lit up" black, in other words, the display is active. Also, when I power the computer on the screen is purple before it goes black. Without anything recorded in any logs I have no way of knowing for sure which one is the problem because I'm not an expert at these things. I mean, the most common problem I've read about is a failure to load the graphics driver correctly at start up, but in the forum posts I've read this causes the computer to freeze up or crash. In my case, I have no freezing or crashing and with the keyboard I can blindly navigate to safely restart the computer.
I think I've pretty much exhausted all the options and the limits of reading this forum. If no one can suggest a solution to this problem at the very least I'd love to hear how I can reproduce the problem so it is capable of being recorded to a log file so that in turn I can report this correctly as a bug and/or provide better details about the issue so someone can read it and say "this is your problem and this is how you fix it."
If you've got this far down into my post, thank you so much for reading the whole thing. It's a bit lengthy!
Any suggestions are welcome and thank you in advance!
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