Arch Linux

aenda

Member

Registered: 2013-11-30

Posts: 7

Null characters appearing in terminal briefly after boot

Hi,

I recently got a new laptop (2016 HP Spectre x360) and installed Arch on it in a dual-boot with Windows. I am having an odd issue that I cannot seem to find any information about and may be hardware-specific. Immediately after boot, when the login prompt appears, null characters ("^@") will be typed in groups of 3, with about a second in between each group. This goes on for about 30 seconds and then stops.

While this is going on, I have no keyboard issues and can type normally, I just have to wait for this to run its course because the null characters will appear while I am typing my username and password and make it impossible to log in. Hence, this is not a critical problem, but having to wait the extra 30 seconds is slightly annoying and this is frankly a rather odd issue that has piqued my interest.

I really have no idea what would be causing this and what I should try and read up on to troubleshoot this error - all I have done so far is verified that systemd is not reporting any errors during boot.

Thanks for your help!

TheSgtBilko

Member

Registered: 2013-08-13

Posts: 87

Re: Null characters appearing in terminal briefly after boot

Just confirming the same issue (HP laptop with skylake i5-6500U) logging in at tty.
I don't use any DM so I have no clue about that.

"intel-ucode" and "linux-firmware" are installed.

I've seen a few posts asking about this but no solution so far.

acommn

Member

From: mexico city

Registered: 2017-03-15

Posts: 2

Re: Null characters appearing in terminal briefly after boot

Same problem with my HP Spectre X360 13-4103DX (Intel i7 6500U Skylake).

I think it is related to the 'lid virtual button', since it happens whenever I open the lid (after closing it of course). Can reproduce it on a TTY login prompt (just reopen the lid and you'll see those nice '^@') and during a Gnome shell session (for some reason that button is bound to the 'airplane mode' action, and my wifi connection goes off, doesn't matter if resuming a suspend or just reopening the lid).

I'm trying to find a solution disabling that virtual button with UDEV.

acommn

Member

From: mexico city

Registered: 2017-03-15

Posts: 2

Re: Null characters appearing in terminal briefly after boot

Found a temporal solution in another post:

1. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=213094

Using xmodmap to assign 'NoSymbol' to that button. Works well.

Now for me, the question would be, how to make Gnome load my '.Xmodmap' resource file?

cirrus

Member

From: Glasgow Scotland

Registered: 2012-08-24

Posts: 340

Website

Re: Null characters appearing in terminal briefly after boot

Now for me, the question would be, how to make Gnome load my '.Xmodmap' resource file?

For more details, see Remap keys on GNOME3.8 using xmodmap?
I'm not a gnome user so there might well be other/better methods, if so im sure somone will chime in.

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Ancestoral Clan https://cirrus.freevar.com/mclean.html