Solved: low-graphics mode on Ubuntu 16.04 with amdgpu-pro on Dell Precision 7510
Problem: stuck in the well-documented loop with error message "The system is running in low-graphics mode" on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on a bare metal Dell laptop.
This started for me when my Ubuntu 16.04 system froze. After restart, I tried to install system updates via the "Ubuntu Software" GUI. That seemed to hang at roughly 50% complete, and I rebooted at that point. Thereafter I could not get out of the low-graphics-mode situation for many hours because I could not find anyone with exactly the same problem.
The common tip about getting into the alternate terminal window was critical.
Ctrl + Alt + F1
There are many posts about the low-graphics mode error from people with nvidia cards. I eventually found the syntax to check which video card was in my system and it was not nvidia. It was an AMD graphics card which Dell sold me in 2016 as an option on a Dell Precision 7510 laptop.
lshw -c video
product: Venus XTX [Radeon HD 8890M / R9 M275X/M375X]
vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
I figured the problem had to do with the failed installs, so I went down the path of trying to update without killing my system
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
I went through quite a few rounds of automatic removal of unused packages, and got past a problem with a package that had only been half-installed.
However, the package 'libmirclient9' could not be upgraded, no matter what I tried. Eventually I gave up and removed it.
sudo apt-get remove libmirclient9
At that point, I had 0 remaining packages that could be updated.
reboot
But I will still stuck with nothing but a Terminal interface for my Ubuntu system.
I tried deleting the .failsafe file. It was recreated on reboot.
I found the instructions for installing the AMDGPU-PRO software and ran the check to see what I had installed. I had version 16.50. The newest one was version 17.10.
NB: I did not run apt dist-upgrade as advised in the AMD PDF document, because I saw too many warnings about losing packages that way.
I tried to download the driver from the AMD web site using wget in Terminal. Unfortunately this was impossible because amd.com looks for a referrer before granting access to the drive file. If you are not using a browser, an error message html page is returned instead of a valid .tar.xz file. (I could have probably used curl but I do not know its syntax.) (It was not at all obvious what the problem was. The symptom was that the tar command failed. Eventually I realized the problem was the data in the .xz file, not my decompress program.)
To solve the amd.com referrer limitation, I used another system on my local network, downloaded the file using a browser, and then re-published the file over http locally. Then wget worked to get the AMD driver archive. (And of course, IIS would not serve a file with .xz extension so we renamed the file to have a .bin extension temporarily for transfer.)
After that, I used the instructions provided by AMD to install the driver -- and that worked. Finally !!
I had some errors in Ubuntu. I rebooted 3x before I had a completely clean startup with no errors when launching my main applications. I did reinstall the libmirclient9 package.
By the way, I tried reinstalling ubuntu-desktop and that made no difference.
Hope this helps someone. I do not have enough points to post this back as a response on the AskUbuntu site. Sigh.
This started for me when my Ubuntu 16.04 system froze. After restart, I tried to install system updates via the "Ubuntu Software" GUI. That seemed to hang at roughly 50% complete, and I rebooted at that point. Thereafter I could not get out of the low-graphics-mode situation for many hours because I could not find anyone with exactly the same problem.
The common tip about getting into the alternate terminal window was critical.
Ctrl + Alt + F1
There are many posts about the low-graphics mode error from people with nvidia cards. I eventually found the syntax to check which video card was in my system and it was not nvidia. It was an AMD graphics card which Dell sold me in 2016 as an option on a Dell Precision 7510 laptop.
lshw -c video
product: Venus XTX [Radeon HD 8890M / R9 M275X/M375X]
vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
I figured the problem had to do with the failed installs, so I went down the path of trying to update without killing my system
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
I went through quite a few rounds of automatic removal of unused packages, and got past a problem with a package that had only been half-installed.
However, the package 'libmirclient9' could not be upgraded, no matter what I tried. Eventually I gave up and removed it.
sudo apt-get remove libmirclient9
At that point, I had 0 remaining packages that could be updated.
reboot
But I will still stuck with nothing but a Terminal interface for my Ubuntu system.
I tried deleting the .failsafe file. It was recreated on reboot.
I found the instructions for installing the AMDGPU-PRO software and ran the check to see what I had installed. I had version 16.50. The newest one was version 17.10.
NB: I did not run apt dist-upgrade as advised in the AMD PDF document, because I saw too many warnings about losing packages that way.
I tried to download the driver from the AMD web site using wget in Terminal. Unfortunately this was impossible because amd.com looks for a referrer before granting access to the drive file. If you are not using a browser, an error message html page is returned instead of a valid .tar.xz file. (I could have probably used curl but I do not know its syntax.) (It was not at all obvious what the problem was. The symptom was that the tar command failed. Eventually I realized the problem was the data in the .xz file, not my decompress program.)
To solve the amd.com referrer limitation, I used another system on my local network, downloaded the file using a browser, and then re-published the file over http locally. Then wget worked to get the AMD driver archive. (And of course, IIS would not serve a file with .xz extension so we renamed the file to have a .bin extension temporarily for transfer.)
After that, I used the instructions provided by AMD to install the driver -- and that worked. Finally !!
I had some errors in Ubuntu. I rebooted 3x before I had a completely clean startup with no errors when launching my main applications. I did reinstall the libmirclient9 package.
By the way, I tried reinstalling ubuntu-desktop and that made no difference.
Hope this helps someone. I do not have enough points to post this back as a response on the AskUbuntu site. Sigh.
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