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!
So the xrandr auto command didn’t do anything. I downloaded pavucontrol and selected the HDMI configuration. It says that it’s plugged in and that audio is playing, but no actual audio plays. Very strange.