Hi,

I'm running Debian Wheezy x-86 32 bit Kernel 2.6.38-2-686 and I have encountered a problem I'm hoping to get some help with. All help would be greatly appreciated as researching this issue has not led to any concrete information. After a reboot or similar, the process will go through the boot sequence including giving me the option of what kernel to run either 2.6.32 or 2.6.38 and starting module's as well as performing POST and then when the logon screen should appear I'm presented with a flashing cursor. I can boot into saftey mode and the CLI, but not being very efficent with Bash and the CLI I'm not sure where to go or what to do.T.I.A.

Regards Scott

do you / did you have gnome installed? do you have the package 'gnome-core' installed? that's one of the important ones, and it might tell you weather you have gnome at all. Do you have gdm or gdm3 installed?

Did you do a dist-upgrade prior that ? I did also and now I cannot start X , I am getting a console login though . I guess something was broken in the updates .

I haven't had time to investigate further but I hope I will later .

Were you able to boot into the gui previously?.
Have you done any updates recently?,and perhaps installed the new version of X in Testing?.

Hi Fellows,

Thanks for your feedback.Yes I was able to boot into the GUI before and no updates where done recently.GDM3 is installed as well as gnome-core and no dist-upgrade was carried out prior. Everything was working fine prior to this malfunction it just happened all of a sudden after a reboot. I had just used a live CD to look at Fedora 15 beta which uses gnome 3 and I was interested to see what the new desktop environment looked like.

Regards, Scott

Once you are presented the cursor, try to get into a console with CTRL-ALT-F1. Log in as root (or use sudo) and view the contents of this file:
or
Look first for lines starting with (EE), but if that doesn't state clear errors, read thru the entire file, looking phrases like "failed", "not found" or "error".

jlinkels

Hi jlinkels

From flashing cursor, unable to get consol using CTL-ALT-F1. But I booted into saftey mode and logged in as root with no success from the supplied code. I was able list (ls) files in var/log but there is no Xorg.O/log listed.

Regards,Scott

That is a typo, it should be /var/log/Xorg.0.log instead of /var/log/Xorg.0/log.

Hi TobiSGD

When I tried the new piece of code I just get a error message cannot find directory or similar.When I cd into /var/log and then ls there is no Xorg.O.log listed.

Regards Scott

It should be /var/log/Xorg.0.log

The '0' is a zero, not an 'Oh'.

Apologies for the wrong name in the first place, speed of typing...

jlinkels

I would check the filesystem with fsck, just to be sure.

Try CTRL+ALT+F2 to get a terminal, and launch dselect. Update the list of packages. Select which packages, you have to hit the space bar to get to the package screen. If you don't do anything, and just hit enter, then debian will usually be back in the gui after it installs a few programs. But if worse comes to worst, launch dselect again and remove xserver-xorg-core. That will take a bunch of stuff with it, but when you reinstall the same package, then you should for sure have gui. The only other thing is xfonts. You might have to reinstall the 100dpi and 75dpi xfonts. And do read /var/log/Xorg.0.log, maybe not the entire log, but until you find a problem.

This is also a good trick:

X -configure

and follow the directions. If you get a textured screen with an X that moves with the mouse, the xorg.conf.new file works. You test it like so:

X -config /home/sam/xorg.conf.new

Assuming it works,

mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak && cp /home/sam/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf

And you have to use a little common sense. Try the command

sudo startx &

And that should fire up the gui.

And if you installed the nVidia proprietary driver pack, and then recompiled the kernel, you have to install the nVidia driver again.

Hi,freedom lovers
Solved

I would like to thank all concerned that replied to my cries of help, it is greatly appreciated and goes to prove that the open source community is well and truly alive. Kudos to all. Unfortunately nothing seemed to repair my woes and I would've liked to keep on experimenting to find the fault but alas it is my main desktop machine and I need to be operational. So I've taken the easy way out and reinstalled Wheezy and restored my back-upped information and all is up and running as before.

Regards Scott
Stay free Stay Open Source

Based on the kernel options ( multiple kernels) it looks like you upgraded at one point. As AwesomeMachine mentioned if you installed the nvidia proprietary driver you will need to reinstall after the kernel upgrade.

I had the same issue and this was my root cause/solution. I only posted this reply because I am assuming you will do the same thing ("2.6.32 --> 2.6.38") and will be in the same position all over again. So please keep this in mind if you planning on upgrading from squeeze to Wheezy.

That is all correct, and this will remain a problem as long as the kernel is changed from one upgrade to the next.

Therefor it would have been interesting to look at Xorg.0.log (correctly spelled this time) to see if there has been a driver failure.

I have seen reports that once the NVIDIA driver is installed from the Debian repositories, the post-install script for a new kernel should take care of compiling and installing the NVIDIA driver. (I mean the proprietary driver from the repositories, not the nouveau driver). I am not sure if this even works in the testing version, but removing the NVIDIA driver which was installed the nvidia way, and installing it again the Debian way proved impossible for me. Not an uncommon problem.

If you have to upgrade your kernel and want to keep an operational system, you should create a xorg.conf and use the nv driver. This will assure booting into the GUI after an upgrade.

jlinkels