Penumbra loads, but screen goes blank.

**niadh** · 03-01-2010, 01:54 AM

Hi guys, I've had penumbra working under Ubuntu fine, however Ubuntu didn't fulfil my needs any more and moved to Arch Linux (32bit).

I got the Penumbra collection installed but when I come to run it, the screen goes blank, I can hear audio but the monitor goes black and Xorg seems to bomb out on something that looks like the horizontal and vertical refresh are out, and I have to hard reboot cos I can't change to a virtual terminal and bring the system down on the command line.

I have included the hp.log file in tar.gz format as stated in the advise I believe. I have also found a similar thread that exhibits similar results: http://frictionalgames.com/forum/showthr...ank+screen

Same symptoms, I don't think the solution is the same though. I am running up to date drivers for my nVidia 6600 card. Am running Arch Linux 32 bit.

I grabbed the relevant sections of /proc/cpuinfo below and I have 2GB of ram and I have had this running perfectly before under Ubuntu on the same hardware, the only thing I can think that might be the issue is my xorg.conf file, which I have also attached in case it is at fault.

Thanks in advance,
Niadh

model name : AMD Phenom™ 8650 Triple-Core Processor
stepping : 3
cpu MHz : 2300.062
cache size : 512 KB

**jens** · 03-01-2010, 08:17 AM

How far do you get before the black screen? Does it happen on actual startup, before the menu or is it after the menu when you try to start a new game?

**Urkle** · 03-01-2010, 03:41 PM

Can you test other OpenGL applications/games on your system to make sure they work? This sounds like an OpenGL driver installation problem more than anything else.. Possibly the game is trying to use the Mesa GL drivers instead of the Nvidia GL drivers.

**niadh** · 03-01-2010, 04:35 PM

It is on game start up, as soon as the game begins to load the screen goes blank.

Can you suggest a game that might have the same effect, assuming the issue is with mesa gl?

I tried gnu/chess using the opengl back end and it worked in both windowed and full screen mode, but then I don't think it's really the best application for testing with.

**Urkle** · 03-03-2010, 04:23 AM

can you copy the output of the glxinfo command here?

**niadh** · 03-03-2010, 12:50 PM

Sure, here it is Smile

**Urkle** · 03-03-2010, 03:40 PM

mm.. that looks correct.. Are you using any compositing window managers? (ie compiz or the like?)

Have you tried running the game in windowed mode? (edit the settings.cfg in ~/.frictionalgames/Penumbra/Overture/settings.cfg ) Just set Fullscreen="false". Oh can you attach the settings.cfg file as well (before editing)

**niadh** · 03-03-2010, 04:00 PM

Yeah I am using compiz, sorry, I should have realised that could be conflicting, interestingly I don't actually have a settings.cfg file, can I just create one with that line in it?

EDIT: Disabling compiz didn't work.

**jens** · 03-03-2010, 04:51 PM

You don't have a settings.cfg file because it is created on exit of the game, so as it crashes on load it does not get that far. You should normally not do this, but in this case you can go to installation directory/Penumbra/config/ and find a default_settings.cfg file that you can open and edit as suggested above. To be on the save side, save a backup copy of the original default_settings.cfg first as it is this file that is later used as a base for new user settings.cfg files.

**Urkle** · 03-03-2010, 04:53 PM

Or you can just copy the default_settings.cfg to ~/.frictionalgames/Penumbra/Overture/settings.cfg (as that's essentially what the game does on exit)