I've tried the suggestions above but I haven't had any success yet. I moved over to a frugal install to hopefully be more in line with the standard way of running TC. Xvesa was still freezing up on my HP Laptop, and Xfbdev simply wouldn't start, so I've tried to get Xorg-7.7 running instead just because it's got good logging. I can always move back to one of the lighter weight x managers later if possible.
The issue is that whenever I go into gfxmode, whether in the console or in X, I get a garbled screen and can't do anything. Because of this I can't even get to a command line when I UEFI boot (I believe because UEFI booting always goes into graphics mode), so I've done all my troubleshooting in MBR boot mode.
This is my menuentry from grub. I've tried it with all of the commented out lines uncommented as well, but when I did that then I was back in graphics mode with a garbled screen and couldn't see the command line anymore. Commenting them out at least got me the ability to poke around in console mode.
loadfont "unicode"
#set gfxmode=800x600,auto
#set gfxpayload=keep
#insmod all_video
#insmod vbe
#insmod vga
#insmod gfxterm
#terminal_output gfxterm
search --no-floppy --label --set=root "AOIBOOT"
menuentry "Core" {
linux /boot/vmlinuz quiet waitusb=5 pause loglevel=3 showapps syslog text
initrd /boot/core.gz
}
With a frugal install I am now able to see the available vesa modes using Xvesa (although I do see some weird errors at the top - I'm including those in case it's helpful):
tc@box:~$: Xvesa -listmodes
Int 10h (0x4F01) failed: 0x014F (function call failed)
VBE version 3.0 (Intel(R) SKL/KBL Mobile/Desktop Graphics Chipset Accelerated VGA BIOS)
DAC is fixed, controller is VGA compatible, RAMDAC causes snow
Total memory: 65472 kilobytes
0x0013: 320x200x8 (vga compatible) PseudoColor
0x0107: 1280x1024x8 PseudoColor
0x011A: 1280x1024x16 TrueColor [5:6:5:0]
0x011B: 1280x1024x24 TrueColor [8:8:8:8]
0x0105: 1024x768x8 PseudoColor
0x0117: 1024x768x16 TrueColor [5:6:5:0]
0x0118: 1024x768x24 TrueColor [8:8:8:8]
0x0112: 640x480x24 TrueColor [8:8:8:8]
0x0101: 640x480x8 PseudoColor
0x0111: 640x480x16 TrueColor [5:6:5:0]
0x017D: 1920x1080x8 PseudoColor
0x017E: 1920x1080x16 TrueColor [5:6:5:0]
0x017F: 1920x1080x24 TrueColor [8:8:8:8]
output of "lspci -nnk |grep VGA -A3", which looks different from what I get when I run it on Ubuntu (I have Intel integrated graphics 620):
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:5917] (rev 07)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device [103c:8544]
00:04.0 Signal processing controller [1180]: Intel Corporation Skylake Processor Thermal Subsystem [8086:1903] (rev 08)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device [103c:8544]
And finally, I'm attaching my Xorg.0.log. I can see that it's attempting to use 4 different drivers - intel, modesetting, fb, and vesa, but after trying all of them ultimately settles on Vesa. Beyond that point I'm not sure if any of the errors are actually important or not (one looks like it has something to do with OpenGL), but it again results in a garbled screen. For what it's worth, I have a working Ubuntu live usb as well, and when I compared the Xorg logs I saw that Ubuntu is using the modesetting driver, not the intel driver.