Arch Linux

JDSumrall

Member

Registered: 2019-05-11

Posts: 3

Re: Display Manager fails, causes black screen with blinking cursor

Can you go to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d and tell me what conf files are there?

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 13,063

Re: Display Manager fails, causes black screen with blinking cursor

@Ar, your root dir ("/") should not belong to your user, but root:root
a) fix that
b) depending on the cause other ownership/permission might have gone wrong. Any idea what caused that?

Your X11 server in post #16 insta-terminates (cleanly), likely because xinitrc calls twm and esp. xterm as the session keeping process. Do you have xterm installed? (pacman -Qi xterm)
It defaults to the AMD chip, but that seems fine as apparently the internal display is wired to it.

I could imagine that this reverse-prime scenario is the cause for the failure of lightdm & gdm. On which one do you currently focus?

In any event, we should establish a functional display server first, ie. install xterm or adapt the ~/.xinitrc to run something you've actually available.

Ar

Member

Registered: 2019-04-14

Posts: 16

Re: Display Manager fails, causes black screen with blinking cursor

Thanks @JDSumrall.  The files are:  10-quirks.conf and 40-libinput.conf.

Can you go to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d and tell me what conf files are there?

Ar

Member

Registered: 2019-04-14

Posts: 16

Re: Display Manager fails, causes black screen with blinking cursor

Thanks again.  I am not sure "/" belongs to user.  When I do ls -lh /, I get all directories owned by root:root.

If that is a less accurate way to determine ownership than stat \, please let me know how to fix?  I honestly don't know what would have messed the ownership/permissions, I just did a straight install.

So xterm was not installed.  I just installed it and rebooted just to check, but no joy (alternating black/backlit). 

Regarding lightdm and gdm, I tried both on Arch.  I don't have a strong preference for either, but it is now setup for GDM. 

I should mention that I may have had both gdm and lightdm enabled at the same time.  I did

sudo systemctl disable lightdm.service

, and the result was that now on boot it goes straight to a non-graphical login (console) without flailing on blakscreen.  I think I may be close....

@Ar, your root dir ("/") should not belong to your user, but root:root
a) fix that
b) depending on the cause other ownership/permission might have gone wrong. Any idea what caused that?

Your X11 server in post #16 insta-terminates (cleanly), likely because xinitrc calls twm and esp. xterm as the session keeping process. Do you have xterm installed? (pacman -Qi xterm)
It defaults to the AMD chip, but that seems fine as apparently the internal display is wired to it.

I could imagine that this reverse-prime scenario is the cause for the failure of lightdm & gdm. On which one do you currently focus?

In any event, we should establish a functional display server first, ie. install xterm or adapt the ~/.xinitrc to run something you've actually available.

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 13,063

Re: Display Manager fails, causes black screen with blinking cursor

stat tells you the stats for the path you issued, so "stat /" says what "/" looks like - the permissions of the subdirs are irrelevant.
How exactly did you install archlinux?

About fixing it: "man chown"

About the login success: installing xterm would match the attempts to run "startx" from the multi-user.target (the non graphical login)

About what is or not enabled as services:

systemctl list-unit-files --state=enabled

Ar

Member

Registered: 2019-04-14

Posts: 16

Re: Display Manager fails, causes black screen with blinking cursor

Honestly, it was 4 weeks ago now, so I don't remember exactly what I did.  But I followed the Arch instructions.  Regarding chown for "/", of course:  my mind goes to recursive, so I just blanked for a second for some reason.