Black screen after grub and splash, can safe shutdown

[Paul17041993]

I've been stuck trying to un-brick this new install that had been working perfectly fine until the last updates and a reboot, it seems to simply not load the GUI at all after the splash screen. I've done a package check, boot repair, changed the grub params and rolled back the xserver versions yet the results are still exactly the same; a black screen with or without a blinking, inactive cursor...

I've dumped the journalctl -b and apt history outputs so surely someone else can see what's going on...

http://pastebin.com/264YHfyJ
http://pastebin.com/HzQaDxVt

As what can be seen in the boot log, it appears to successfully boot to the "login screen" and pressing the power button at this point causes a safe shutdown, but I cannot actually do anything here that I know of currently.

[oshunluvr]

Boot to the text console and try and launch the GUI from there. Assuming it fails, go pack to the text console and kill X and look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log and ~/.xsession-errors.

If I were a betting man, it's the AMD video driver. You might try booting with the VESA driver as a test.

[Paul17041993]

Boot to the text console and try and launch the GUI from there. Assuming it fails, go pack to the text console and kill X and look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log and ~/.xsession-errors.

If I were a betting man, it's the AMD video driver. You might try booting with the VESA driver as a test.

I've tried many drivers so far and X still refuses to start, it appears to find the screen but then deletes it because it cant find a config...?

Here's the latest X log; http://pastebin.com/zmkG2wUR

[oshunluvr]

Well clearly it's the video configuration, hence "No Screens Found"

You need to research your video card model and figure out how to configure it.

[Paul17041993]

Well clearly it's the video configuration, hence "No Screens Found"

You need to research your video card model and figure out how to configure it.

You cant "configure" it besides enabling or disabling certain features, it's completely automatic.

However now we have a game of spot-the-difference;

Log via recovery mode (root); http://pastebin.com/cNQaxvqG
It appears to actually start correctly here, showing the mouse cursor but then going back to the CLI with xserver returning 0

In normal boot however, it stops half way; http://pastebin.com/uWhX4sxv
leaving the system with a black screen and frozen CLI cursor ( underscore ), pressing ctrl+alt+F1 gives a CLI login screen however I'm not able to get X past the error.

[Paul17041993]

(Pardon for this double-post, but in this case it's suitable)

Great news! I worked out what was going on.

Seems like in the end of it all it wasnt any drivers or similar problems with xserver etc, but instead it turns out a rogue file from p4v that gets copied into /usr/bin was almost completely bricking the entire system. I worked this out by doing a complete clean re-install (installing over the top without formatting was causing the iso installer to fail too), backing up the entire root, then gradually setting up everything until I noticed applications started crashing after copying p4v in, logging out then crashed the GUI completely and I switched to tty1 and reversed the copy, comparing with the backup to make sure.

The rogue file in question is 'qt.conf', which appears to be a directory configuration, having this file present in /usr/bin causes any running applications to eventually crash (including the full user session) and you cant open any applications either. Immediately deleting the file will restore behaviour back to normal even without rebooting.

Should this be considered a bug to be reported? It's a config file that has a purpose but in this case it seems like too easy of a method to brick a system...

[Snowhog]

Not knowing what 'p4v' is; it isn't a package available in the standard repositories; I can't comment on your discovery and solution. What is 'p4v' and where did you obtain it from?

[wizard10000]

Sorry, I had to google it because I wanted to know too. It's a cross-platform versioning tool.

[Snowhog]

...it turns out a rogue file from p4v that gets copied into /usr/bin was almost completely bricking the entire system.

Hmm.

How did you install p4v? From what I've read, the program installs itself 'contained' to it's own location, and you can "add the bin directory to your PATH so that you can launch P4V from anywhere on the command-line."

How to install P4V on Linux

[Paul17041993]

Hmm.

How did you install p4v? From what I've read, the program installs itself 'contained' to it's own location, and you can "add the bin directory to your PATH so that you can launch P4V from anywhere on the command-line."

How to install P4V on Linux

It doesn't have a default/recommended install method (that link above tells you to set it up inside /Downloads, which is stupid), so one might assume you simply copy the bin and lib folders into /usr with everything else, which works well except for the qt.conf breaking every other application...

For now I'm just running it inside its own Perforce directory next to its workspaces until the developers fix the design (it's not the only thing they need to fix).