Arch Linux

zagabar

Member

Registered: 2006-08-05

Posts: 33

Black screen during upgrade, then getting no graphics

Hello!

I have a laptop with arch. I have gnome installed but I use GDM to start i3wm.

When I upgraded today (with pacman -Syu) the screen went black mid-upgrade. Then it briefly flashed now and then, showing the desktop. It also didn't respond to anything, including trying to change to a text based terminal. I gave it some minutes and then force-switched it off and restarted. Then when booting, the boot loading text stops at "Started User Manager for UID 120" and then it's stuck there. I can however change to a text based terminal.

What I tried:
I tried starting x with startx in a text based terminal. I got X started with the basic windows. Then I tried using journalctl to display the info about gdm, and got this:
Starting GNOME display manager...
Started GNOME display manager.
Child process -325 was already dead.
Child process 317 was already dead.
Unable to kill session worker process
Child process -<another PID> was already dead.
Child process <another PID> was already dead.
---This repeats every minute with different PIDs constantly---

Any ideas on how to debug/fix?

Help appreciated, thanks.

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 8,999

Website

Re: Black screen during upgrade, then getting no graphics

More information please -- what is your hardware?

Also: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=195866

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Jin, Jîyan, Azadî

zagabar

Member

Registered: 2006-08-05

Posts: 33

Re: Black screen during upgrade, then getting no graphics

I am on a laptop with intel HD 4000. Not sure what more you need to know about the hardware, and I can't get an lshw since I can't use it due to the problem.

I saw that thread but the problem description seems different. The issue in that thread is described as if it still displays a graphical GDM login prompt, and then fails when logging in. Mine doesn't even get that far.

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 8,999

Website

Re: Black screen during upgrade, then getting no graphics

What is the output of:

grep EE /var/log/Xorg.0.log

It would probably be a good idea to use `sprunge` or similar to upload the entire contents of that log and post the link here.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Li … in_clients

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Jin, Jîyan, Azadî