I have a thinkpad T480 with LMDE and up until about two months ago it would work with this Samsung commercial display TV, although it never played audio from the TV like it was supposed to.
Now when I plug in the HDMI cable the screen turns black (not blue, which is when there’s no signal). If I go into display it shows that the TV is connected.
I know that this isn’t a hardware issue because I’ve used the same HDMI cable and laptop on a different TV and it worked fine. xrandr also says that HDMI-2 is connected.
Help
@countrypunk @linux I’ve had similar issues that I’ve attributed to me using i3, but the fix might work for you. Run ‘xrandr’ and find the name of your TV output (I see yours is HDMI-2), and then run ‘xrandr --output HDMI-2 --auto’. That should make the screen work. If audio still isn’t working and you use pulseaudio, open ‘pavucontrol’ (graphical program for changing audio settings, recommend downloading it if you don’t have it). You can probably find a command that does the same thing with just ‘pactl’, but ‘pavucontrol’ will be way easier. On the tab for configuration/options, you’ll have a drop down for audio output settings. Change it to something that has HDMI in the name, and that might fix it. I have a T490 and this has always been an issue for some reason, but the above steps get the display working and audio routed. Hopefully my fix works for you!
- Any recent software updates that you might find relevant?
- It would be good to know which distro you use
- “Samsung commercial” would make me believe it doesn’t get automatic updates, but just in case, that is also a factor.
- Does the TV work with other input sources on the same port?
- Reading “Samsung”, I would assume it has multiple input ports. What was the result with other ports.
Maybe you just need to “enable” it in the display settings of your DE.
does
dmesgorjournalctl -fgive any hints as to whats going on as you connect the cable?
