No Video on a Mac Mini

[joedamac]

Greetings,

OK. So I hope I'm not annoying too many of you as I've posted about this 3-4 times previously. Tried everything that people have advised me to do, still to no avail. I'll try to be more verbose in my description this time.

So, problem is:

Trying to boot off the Live CD, both the normal and alternate text only installer of both Hardy and Intrepid, but I'm not getting any video the moment Ubuntu starts to boot.

Just to clarify, I insert the Ubuntu CD, I restart my mac holding C. I get the first few seconds of white/gray splash screen from OS X (before the Apple Logo pops up) and once the CD starts to spin and starts loading into Ubuntu, my display goes black. It would probably say 'Out of Range' if it were a computer monitor, but its a Widescreen LCD HD TV, so I just get a blinking '480i' note at the bottom left corner of my TV, telling me that it can't display whatever resolution it's trying to.

So, I never see anything, from the *moment* I boot from the CD to when I finally hear the Ubuntu chime about 2-3 minutes later.

My HDTV is connected to my Mac Mini/1.66ghz Intel Core Duo via a HDMI to DVI cable. I don't have another Monitor to use, and frankly if I have to use a different one, I'd rather stick to OS X. I love my 32" widescreen. =)

So, it boots, but I get no video, whatsoever, zip. I'm a complete linux newbie, so I'm hoping there's a very straight forward way to blindly open a command prompt, enter a few commands, and change my monitor's resolution. I've been scouring for about a week for someone with similar problems and I'm not finding a thing.

Thanks much!

[cyberdork33]

Please do not post in multiple locations. It makes it difficult for people to follow what you have done.

It sounds like your TV is incapable of displaying the resolution being used by your computer. This is not to say that the computer cannot use other resolutions once you have everything setup, but for some reason the basic 640x480 resolution console terminal screen will not display. Try installing with you other monitor, then once you can get it to use a higher resolution, then try the TV again. You will probably still get a blank screen for the first few seconds of booting since it still uses the basic resolution initially on startup.

[pwoodhouse2000]

Did this ever get resolved - I'm having the exact same issue, except I did successfully install ubuntu (single partition) using a different monitor, but when I take the MacMini back to the living room and plug in the TV, I get nothing.

I turned of graphical login, and I can get to the command prompt now, but as soon as I turn on gdm I get nothing.