Recently had to install a custom flavour of Debian Testing (current codename ‘stretch’) on my Intel NUC DN2820FYKH. The installation was straight forward. Booting it, wasn’t…

On booting to a freshly installed system, I got a black screen. After a google search, this seems to be quite frequent on a variety of NUCs. A bug ticket was opened in freedesktop.org and mention a few ways of solving it:

  • switching to a DVI-DBI cable from some other type
  • changing the connected monitor
  • downgrading from a 4.x kernel to a late 3.x series kernel

One interesting article at http://01.org suggested to add i915.modeset=0 or acpi=off on your Grub. This actually fixed the black screen issue but two others emerged:

  • CPU was rendering graphics which was pretty slow (glxinfo | grep OpenGL output string llvmpipe)
  • Screen resolution wasn’t the correct one. arandr listed only one resolution.

The following sections goes through the process of installing necessary video drivers and downgrading your kernel from 4.x to 3.x.

Configure Xorg

After checking for errors and warnings on my /var/log/Xorg.0.log, had to install all this:

apt-get install mesa-utils
apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel
apt-get install libgl1-mesa
apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dri
apt-get install libdrm-intel1 libdrm2

Reboot and confirm with glxinfo | grep OpenGL that you’re not rendering with your CPU.

Downgrade to kernel 3.x

Still, screen resolution wasn’t fixed. On 01.org - NUC5I3RYH - BLACK SCREEN - DEBIAN, one comment hinted that a previous kernel version actually works. The freedesktop bug ticket hinted the same. Tried to downgrade to jessies kernel and finally had my NUC displaying the correct resolution.

# Go to stable (currently jessie)
sed -i.original s/stretch/jessie/g /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update

# Find suited kernel package 
apt-cache search linux-image-3.*

# Find suited kernel version ("Candidate" field)
apt-cache policy linux-image-3.16.0-4-amd64 | grep Candidate

# Install kernel image & headers (kernel package=candidate version)
apt-get install linux-image-3.16.0-4-amd64=3.16.7-ckt25-1
apt-get install linux-headers-3.16.0-4-amd64=3.16.7-ckt25-1

# Fix kernel version (avoid update to 4.x.x)
apt-mark hold linux-headers-3.16.0-4-amd64
apt-mark hold linux-image-3.16.0-4-amd64

# Back to Testing
mv /etc/apt/sources.list.original /etc/apt/sources.list

Next step is to make grub to default to the newly installed kernel, so you don’t need to switch manually.

# Find the newly installed kernel
cat /boot/grub/grub.cfg | grep menuentry | grep 'class os' | cut -d "'" -f2

# Update the /etc/default/grub with the new kernel (copy previous string)
NEW_GRUB_DEFAULT="Debian GNU/Linux, with Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64"
sed '/^GRUB_DEFAULT=/{h;s/=.*/='"$NEW_GRUB_DEFAULT"'/};${x;/^$/{s//GRUB_DEFAULT='"$NEW_GRUB_DEFAULT"'/;H};x}' -i.original /etc/default/grub

# Ensure you're happy with the changes
diff /etc/default/grub /etc/default/grub.original

# Update grub
# - You'll probably get an 'Warning: Please don't use old title'.
#   You can either ignore or follow the instructions to fix it.
update-grub2

If you don’t have update-grub2 or update-grub, you can simply create one:

cat <<'EOF' > /usr/sbin/update-grub2
#!/bin/sh
set -e
exec grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg "$@"
EOF
chmod +x  /usr/sbin/update-grub2

References