[SOLVED] display managers boot to black screen; no obvious error

Mike9994 · 2016-03-26 17:21:10

Hey Arch! I've been working on my first install and I've got all of the basic install done out of the beginners guide. Now I'm working on my display manager and my window manager and they've been giving me quite the hassle.

Initially installed the proper Nvidia driver via pacman followed by the appropriate Xorg packages. Following from that I installed SLiM as my preferred DM and realizing my mistake of not having my .xinitrc in my home folder, it worked. However I was unable to log in which turned out to be due to not having my window manager installed. So I installed i3, put an exec line in my .xinitrc, and finally everything completely broke after that.

Xorg was getting a seg fault at start and after fixing that, it could not find a screen which I resolved by simply uninstalling all of the nvidia, SLiM, i3, and Xorg packages and reinstalling. After doing the necessary configuration, I arrived at the issue I'm having now: boot to a black screen (with a white in the top left corner). I'm able to ctrl+alt+fn# to get to a session to log in from.

Checking the Xorg logs, I didn't see any errors, just SLiM "waiting for X server to accept connections." I assumed at this point it was SLiM (which I learned at this point is no longer maintained) so I uninstalled and opted for lightdm with lightdm-gtk-greeter as the greeter. Sadly, nothing changed. And now I come to you all.

are all the related logs

As far as I can tell, there are no errors.

are all the packages I've installed (even if they're commented out

lightdm.conf is configured to use the lightdm-gtk-greeter as it's greeter.

Last edited by Mike9994 (2016-03-27 16:59:36)

loqs · 2016-03-26 18:08:07

Hello Mike9994 welcome to arch.

[     5.686] (II) xfree86: Adding drm device (/dev/dri/card1)
[     5.686] (II) xfree86: Adding drm device (/dev/dri/card0)
.....
[ 6.015] (II) NVIDIA(0): NVIDIA GPU GeForce GTX 860M (GM107-A) at PCI:1:0:0 (GPU-0)

It appears you are using a laptop with Hybrid graphics see Bumblebee or Optimus for changes that need to be made to xorg.conf and additional packages you will may need to install.
Edit:
grammar

Last edited by loqs (2016-03-26 18:08:36)

Docbroke · 2016-03-26 18:21:09

try this, from console

sudo systemctl disable lightdm

this will disable, autostart of lightdm,

on next boot, login & try to start i3 from console with below command, (this will start x & i3, bypassing .xinitrc)

startx /usr/bin/i3

Mike9994 · 2016-03-26 18:44:13

Okay. I'll try and get bumblebee installed as it seems like the best option.

Before I start installing things though, the wiki wants you to verify some things before you start. specifically:

"If neither "Optimus" or "switchable" is in the bios, still make sure both gpu's will be enabled and that the integrated graphics (igfx) is initial display (primary display). The display should be connected to the onboard integrated graphics, not the discrete graphics card. If integrated graphics had previously been disabled and discrete graphics drivers installed, be sure to remove /etc/X11/xorg.conf or the conf file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d related to the discrete graphics card."

I have not yet restarted to check but I'm very sure that those options are not in my BIOS, so how do I go about verifying that both GPUs are enable and the integrated graphics is the initial display?

Do I delete xorg.conf if and only if the integrated card is disabled AND the discrete graphics drivers are installed? Or should I do it even if the integrated card is not disabled but the discrete graphics driver is not installed (I don't even know if this is a possible scenario). I know for a fact I have the Nvidia graphics drivers installed.

EDIT:

I stand corrected, switchable graphics IS in my bios and is enabled. So is it necessary to proceed with all that other instructions?

Also DocBroke, I tried your suggestion and there was no significant change. When I kill Xorg it dumps some output and there is a log line saying that it can't find destination coordinates. (I apologize for directing that output to a file and not pushing it up to my git as a log).

Last edited by Mike9994 (2016-03-26 18:56:11)

loqs · 2016-03-26 19:43:07

Mike9994 wrote:

I stand corrected, switchable graphics IS in my bios and is enabled. So is it necessary to proceed with all that other instructions?

If you do not change anything I would not expect the result to be any different.
From NVIDIA_Optimus

disabling one of the devices in BIOS, which may result in improved battery life if the NVIDIA device is disabled, but may not be available with all BIOSes and does not allow GPU switching
using the official Optimus support included with the proprietary NVIDIA driver, which offers the best NVIDIA performance but does not allow GPU switching and can be more buggy than the open-source driver
using the PRIME functionality of the open-source nouveau driver, which allows GPU switching but offers poor performance compared to the proprietary NVIDIA driver and does not currently implement any powersaving
using the third-party Bumblebee program to implement Optimus-like functionality, which offers GPU switching and powersaving but requires extra configuration

Mike9994 · 2016-03-26 19:55:41

loqs wrote:

If you do not change anything I would not expect the result to be any different.

I was referring explicitly to this from the Bumblebee wiki:

"If neither "Optimus" or "switchable" is in the bios, still make sure both gpu's will be enabled and that the integrated graphics (igfx) is initial display (primary display). The display should be connected to the onboard integrated graphics, not the discrete graphics card. If integrated graphics had previously been disabled and discrete graphics drivers installed, be sure to remove /etc/X11/xorg.conf or the conf file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d related to the discrete graphics card."

I have found that "switchable" is in my BIOS, therefore is it still necessary to continue checks that it mentions and delete the xorg.conf file BEFORE beginning the installation of bumblebee?

loqs · 2016-03-26 20:15:20

Yes that configuration relates to the discrete graphics card so it should be deleted or renamed to any extension other than .conf if you do not want to delete it.
You might find configuring Nvidia_Optimus easier than Bumblebee.

Mike9994 · 2016-03-27 16:57:01

I thought I posted an update last night but I guess not. I installed bumblebee and the necessary packages and with zero configuration, everything work on reboot! Thanks a lot guys. Great that I actually have a visual environment to accomplish things more easily in (like posting to the arch forums for example).

Arch Linux

#1 2016-03-26 17:21:10

[SOLVED] display managers boot to black screen; no obvious error

#2 2016-03-26 18:08:07

Re: [SOLVED] display managers boot to black screen; no obvious error

#3 2016-03-26 18:21:09

Re: [SOLVED] display managers boot to black screen; no obvious error

#4 2016-03-26 18:44:13

Re: [SOLVED] display managers boot to black screen; no obvious error

#5 2016-03-26 19:43:07

Re: [SOLVED] display managers boot to black screen; no obvious error

#6 2016-03-26 19:55:41

Re: [SOLVED] display managers boot to black screen; no obvious error

#7 2016-03-26 20:15:20

Re: [SOLVED] display managers boot to black screen; no obvious error

#8 2016-03-27 16:57:01

Re: [SOLVED] display managers boot to black screen; no obvious error

Board footer