You are not logged in.
My box was an nvidia card using two monitors to display one desktop spread over the two monitors, this worked but was unsatisfactory as the screens were different sizes and the video card only had 1G memory.
I upgraded to an AMD card with 8 G and two hdmi outputs as I had two hdmi monitors. Post test display OK, grub runs OK as does slim, which uses the full 1920 x 1080 and spread across both monitors as expected. Slim passes control to .xintrc which starts XFCE, te screen goes black then white, with a cursor in the middle of the screen, the full XFCE screen appears to have loaded as I can remember the position of a terminal, the cursor changes as I mouseover it and I can enter commands like shutdown which works. Presumably other commands would work but there is no visual feedback.
As a test I altered .xinitrc to start KDE, or whatever it is called now, this works as in I can see things onscreen, drag windows between screens and actually use the system again.
For me this implies that all hardware is working as is xserver which implies the correct AMD drivers are present, but there is 'something' in XFCE settings that prevents it displaying. I cannot see anything obvious in the config files, could it be in the systemwide files?
I have tried reinstalling XFCE but it was reloaded from cache and of course reused my personal settings and made no difference. Any guidance on the best way to proceed would be appreciated.
Last edited by weedfreak (2020-02-29 10:26:55)
Offline
I use xfce4's Settings > Display function to configure my 4 monitors, which are all different sizes but the same resolution at 1920x1080 each. It's a lot easier than monkeying around with /etc/X11 config files.
Settings are stored in ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/displays.xml
If you rename that file or delete it, it should revert to default settings and allow you to re-do them however you want .
Offline
A bit of a problem using xfce4's Settings>Display as I cannot see anything when booting into xfce. I had been looking at xfce4-desktop.xml in the same folder as that seemed to reference non existent monitors. displays.xml just contains
<channel name="displays" version="1.0">
<property name="ActiveProfile" type="string" value="Default"/>
</channel>
which sounds like it is default setting, but I will try deleting it to see what happens, thanks for the tip.
Offline
Well, my xfce4-desktop.xml is 231 lines as it contains info on 4 monitors with 4 workspaces each. I guarantee that it was completely generated by the settings apps. I would definitely try renaming rather than deleting to give you the option to go back.
You can see by my Registered date when I started using Arch, but I started on Linux around 1997. I don't have a problem with text config files, but it's really nice that it's not so necessary these days.
For the most part, I try to start with little or no config and only add what I have to.
Offline
I am a little confused by your solutions, you first suggest deleting displays.xml, you then suggest it should be xfce4-desktop.xml that was regenerated. My xfce4-desktop.xml was about 2000 lines long and contained references to nonexistent monitors, having renamed it and regenerated the file it now seems correct. It lists both monitors and all the workspaces correctly.
Only problem is that it has made no difference to what I see.
Offline
If you can enter in commands, try either disabling the compositor:
xfwm4 --compositor=off --replace...and/or trying with vblank mode set to xpresent:
xfwm4 --vblank=xpresent --replaceAnother test would be to create a secondary user account and try to login with this account - to rule out any sort of profile issue.
Offline
In the general messing about I seem to have lost my way around the white screen so I created a new user account which works as expected.
So I am now assuming the problem lies in my original profile.
Offline
In that case, if you wanted to go back to your previous user just move or delete the /home/[previous_user]/.config/xfce4 directory. You could even copy the newly created profile directory in place of the old user's.
Offline
Deleted the .config/xfce4 and .cache/xfce4 folders and restarted. Had to repersonalise everything of course and no definitive answer as to why it stopped working but at least I have a useable system. Thanks for the help.
Offline