Blank start-up screen after upgrading to Etonia

Hello GNUbahn,

first of all i don't have found a solution, but i faced the same problem with my librebooted X60s (i686). First i used the helpful command of Magic Banana and the upgrade went well.

After the first update of my system i noticed the same blinking cursor in the upper left corner as you did.

I couldn't boot up into the system again.

After that i decided to make a fresh install of T9 Mini, thinking it could have to do something with my upgrade.
But i ended up into the same error. The installation went well, after trying to update the system, i looked onto the blinking cursor in the left corner again.

Frustrated i installed another distro onto my machine with success, but this is not the solution.

With my other librebooted machines (x86) i'm facing in the moment the problem, that after the first boot up there is a very long delay until the login manager appears.

On one of the machines i installed today another distro and the problem with the delay disappears.

So both problems are maybe? Trisquel problems, not libreboot problems.

I'm very interested in solution.

I posted this to show that you are not alone. :-(

C.

Hi Vanecek,

Thanks for your solidarity.

I still haven't found a permanent solution but only a temporary one, as mentioned in the OP.

Have you tried those?

1: press ctrl+alt+F1 simultaneaously (takes you to terminal mode)
2: log in with your username and password
3: run the command: startx (starts the gui)

Hello GNUbahn,

it's too late to try it, because now another distro is running on that machine to use it without that issue.

When there will be a solution i will rollback to Trisquel again.

Best wishes.

C.

Hello GNUbahn,

This is probably a waste of your time, but I saw something and remembered your post.
I looked in my MATE System monitor and see they are both started. Maybe you could see if they are started on your system after you manually 'startx'.
It comes from:
https://libreboot.org/docs/gnulinux/configuring_parabola.html#configuring-the-graphical-desktop-environment. (speaking to Parabola, so....?)

"After installing all the required packages, we need to make it so that the MATE Desktop Environment will start automatically, whenever we boot our computer; to do this, we have to enable the display manager, lightdm, as well as the service that will prompt us with a login window, accounts-daemon:

# systemctl enable lightdm
# systemctl enable accounts-daemon

Now you have installed the MATE Desktop Environment....."

Hello GNUbahn,

I had the same problem on my HP Compaq nx7300. I tried it a few times with a new installing Trisquel 9 and upgrading from Trisquel 8 to 9. Without success.

I think it is an lightdm or X issue.

These are the steps I did and it worked for me:

1. A fresh install of Trisquel 9.
2. Don't run a system upgrade after the installation!
3. Install lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings. sudo apt install lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings. This will change a little bit your login screen.
4. Now run a system update. sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
5. Reboot your system.

I hope it will work for you too.

Diopon

diopon and GNUbahn had some success with installation of alternative software:
Install lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings: sudo apt install lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings.

Trisquel_8 (flidas) was exhibiting similar behavior after an upgrade from Trisquel_7.

On the GRUB menu, only the two listed "Advanced Settings" would complete the bootup process,
so I first applied the recommended software install, then ran the update and upgrade steps,
followed by running update-grub and additional re-boots to both of the alternatives,
which are the only two versions of Trisquel_8 that are present. I could tell that applying
the software update to one of them also fixed the other one up with the new login layout.

After all this I tried starting the main choice of the GRUB menu, and the new login theme
came right up, exactly as for the advanced settings' startups.

Just did a fresh install of Trisquel on a X60s and faced the same problem after the first update.
Installing the lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings also worked in this case.

Hi folks, I hit the same issue with another old 32-bit Acer Aspire One (model ZG5) I just got hold of. I installed Etiona and it ran fine after the initial install. But after I ran "sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y" and rebooted, the system was hanging with a black screen and a blinking cursor. The fix of installing lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings worked for me too.

Hello!

I've not done a full new distro upgrade, but running the latest updates also has done this to my Libreboot-ed X60 as well. I just get a blinking typeing cursor on startup. It stays like that forever and appears idle. I have multiple kernels installed and tried to boot into any of them and all of them were the same. The most recent updates seems to have killed my X60 in the same way as everyone else.

What should we do? Are the devs aware?

The only way i got around this with security in mind was to image the laptop with hard disk encryption and auto login. This kept security (by means of the hard disk encryption) and login automatically bypassed the problem auto logging on as a pre defined user. Else Triskel (Trisquel KDE desktop) is not affected by this issue.