Arch Linux

FaulkNet

Member

Registered: 2014-01-26

Posts: 13

Enabled XDM on Optimus laptop now Arch hangs, can't get to terminal

Bear with me, I'm not a complete noob but I respond best to thorough explanations.

I've been having no end to trouble with graphics on Arch on two different machines lately. This thread is about an Alienware R3 laptop I've been trying to get up and running. Being an Alienware, it has an Optimus graphics setup.

I finally got XFCE to start after installing bumblebee, etc. I enabled the XDM service, but it would only get stuck in a login loop. At the behest of the documentation I changed the file permissions of my ~/.xsessions file to 700 to make it executable. Upon reboot after a couple lines of output all I get is a black screen with a non-blinking white cursor in the corner and I can't Ctrl+Alt+F# into another terminal.

Little help? It's a shame to have a brick after coming so far.

Last edited by FaulkNet (2020-01-08 06:53:26)

FaulkNet

Member

Registered: 2014-01-26

Posts: 13

Re: Enabled XDM on Optimus laptop now Arch hangs, can't get to terminal

UPDATE: Managed to change the run level to 1 in grub and disabled the XDM service. Have my terminal back, XFCE starts fine when asked outside of the display manager. Still no closer to understanding what happened and why I can't get XDM to startxfce4.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,672

Re: Enabled XDM on Optimus laptop now Arch hangs, can't get to terminal

Post your journal/Xorg log from a faulty boot.

Random repeating suggestions. Does pressing buttons help during the blinking part? If so add

random.trust_cpu=on

to your kernel parameters, another thing to try is enabling early KMS for the i915 module.

FaulkNet

Member

Registered: 2014-01-26

Posts: 13

Re: Enabled XDM on Optimus laptop now Arch hangs, can't get to terminal

Sorry I've been slow to respond, things have been busy. This is embarrassing for me because I spend my share of time at work reading through logs to debug problems, but I haven't had a lot of experience doing so in Arch, so I'm not well versed in where things are with regard to the logs. That said, this has the potential to be good for me.

I experienced the faulty boots around the midnight of Jan 7th-8th and I've been swimming through journalctl but I've been having trouble identifying relevant info. Along the same lines, since this is so far in the past opening Xorg.0.log with a text editor is just too long to wade through. Any tips for gleaning info from the logs would be appreciated. I could use some hand holding here.

Incidentally, in XFCE under the "Other" menu when I clicked on "NVIDIA X Server Settings" I experienced another freeze. I have a feeling this whole thing has to do with the Optimus graphics configuration, e.g. that the discrete graphics card is not available through bumblebee at the moment. Still trying to figure out how bumblebee works as well. Lots of learning curves going on. Any and all help is appreciated.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,672

Re: Enabled XDM on Optimus laptop now Arch hangs, can't get to terminal

The proper xorg log should always be fresh for every session. The journal can be filtered quite fine grainedly https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sy … ing_output

Also you shouldn't mix and  match things. uninstall bumblebee if you want to use optimus-manager and vice-versa. Keeping multiple of those set up will invariably lead to conflict.