Arch Linux

Isomorphism

Member

Registered: 2008-04-29

Posts: 41

Cannot login to GUI (Ctrl+Alt+F7 gives a blank screen) after an update

Hello,

I appreciate any help I can get on the following problem

Problem:

1)  After Arch boots, it takes me to tty1. I have to login using the terminal. Ctrl+Alt+F7,Ctrl+Alt+F8 etc gives me a blank screen.

2)  If I ping any node outside the network, it just drops all the packets. However interestingly pacman works like a charm!
      Also elinks can connect to google, but gives a blank screen when connecting to www.archlinux.org!

(As a result, I am posting from my Windows)

I tried .... :

0) I tried upgrading the system with sudo pacman -Syu, the upgrade did not happen. The error message was something like: d4x requires openssl ver to be less than 0.9.8.

1) Used that search function on the texts:"openssl<=0.9.8 " "Cannot login to GUI", "startx error","xorg error","(EE) Failed to load /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so".

a) I used sudo pacman -Syu --ignore openssl. Now gnome-policykit was causing a similar problem. So sudo pacman -Syu --ignore openssl --ignore gnome-policykit worked fine!
b) I followed post #4 in http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=63784.

2) Following the Xorg wiki, I changed the runlevel to 5,  tried to start X by running startx or xinit in tty1. I got an error:  Xorg.0.log showed (from my memory)

(EE) Failed to load /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so
Fatal server error:
no screens found

<control-C>
xinit: No such file or directory (errno 2): unable to connect to X server
xinit: No such process (errno 3): unexpected signal 2.

3) I could not get certain dependencies, when I was following step 2, in the usual repos so I tried enabling [testing] repo. This worked. Files from [testing] could have been harmful since I blindly installed few programs  

My Suspicions:

I might have updated an individual package after a long time and started a sequence of individual package updating that led me to this state.  A lot of forum posts have made me realize my folly. I apologise and will be careful from now on.

I had to reinstall bash at some stage. At one point, I removed xorg-server because it clashed with xf86-input-evdev! (I think I lost my GUI there)... Then to circumvent that problem I reinstalled both the files.... soon I removed initscripts for some other file (I think this caused the strange internet problem):rolleyes:

I do not want to reinstall my system. Is there a way to get GUI back without reinstalling?

Thanks,
Srikanth

kazuo

Member

From: São Paulo/Brazil

Registered: 2008-03-18

Posts: 413

Website

Re: Cannot login to GUI (Ctrl+Alt+F7 gives a blank screen) after an update

I only like to note that you really did some very wrong choices, you ignored openssl update (something in core, used by pacman) to use d4x (something in aur, used to download p0rn at max speed )

I dont know what is the state of your system now, but after removing initscripts too, I think that things are very bad.

I recommend to first check the integrity of base/core pkgs forget for now about gui, you need to have a consistent system first. Wiki have some tips on this (I least looked at pacman tips, and it have some tips on reinstalling only base system)

For the X error, look with you have the correct driver installed (from the error, look like you have a intel card so install the intel driver)

But, really updated the base/core to a good state before any more deleting things that dont look useful.

Isomorphism

Member

Registered: 2008-04-29

Posts: 41

Re: Cannot login to GUI (Ctrl+Alt+F7 gives a blank screen) after an update

Thanks kazuo.

I have updated the base/core packages.

/var/logs/pacman.log file said that rc.conf, inittab and modprobe.conf have been backed up with an extension .pacsave (that is rc.conf is saved as rc.conf.pacsave e.t.c). So I restored these files. I have all the drivers installed. My guess is that the absence of modprobe.conf was causing these problems.

Unfortunately, I commented out the last line "x:5:respawn:/usr/bin/slim >& /dev/null"  in inittab. Now I am facing a new problem. When arch boots, it stops after saying "Starting Simple Login Manager..................[DONE]". After a while it says "Id c<i> respawning too fast"  where <i> = 1,2,3,4,5. And finally it says "Run out of init levels".

My question is how do I modify files when I cant even boot? I know there is a way using liveCD. But I am not sure how.

Surgat_

Member

Registered: 2007-08-08

Posts: 317

Re: Cannot login to GUI (Ctrl+Alt+F7 gives a blank screen) after an update

If your problem is in inittab, you can boot to runlevel 1 (single user mode) by adding 1 to the kernel line in grub: press E to edit the grub entry for Arch, E again to edit the kernel line and B to boot when you're done.

Isomorphism

Member

Registered: 2008-04-29

Posts: 41

Re: Cannot login to GUI (Ctrl+Alt+F7 gives a blank screen) after an update

Thank you, Surgat_.

I could access inittab and uncomment the line "x:5:respawn:/usr/bin/slim >& /dev/null". Still the booting process hangs at starting simple login manager. After a while it says "Id c<i> respawning too fast"  where <i> = 1,2,3,4,5. And finally it says "Run out of init levels".

Is reinstalling the only option now?

Surgat_

Member

Registered: 2007-08-08

Posts: 317

Re: Cannot login to GUI (Ctrl+Alt+F7 gives a blank screen) after an update

I think you should first boot to runlevel 3 and try to start slim, and then set the default runlevel to 5. The line in inittab that sets the default runlevel to boot into is "id:<runlevel>:initdefault:", so comment the one that has a 5 in it and uncomment the one with a 3.

Then you can debug the errors that slim might throw up when you issue "/etc/rc.d/slim start"