After updating Slowroll today I cannot start any UI shell: KDE Plasma Xorg, Plasma Wayland or IceWM (Xorg). All fails without showing any error. Xorg variants return back to SDDM, Wayland seems to hang up the whole system.
I have to write this on my tablet
When switching to tty (Ctrl+Shift+F1), logging as root, and running dmesg command I see potential culprit:
Lockdown: Xorg.bin: raw io port access is restricted
And a similar message about numlockbios.
ps ax however shows Xorg.bin to be running, but nothing else related to any GUI shell.
I haven’t had to solve any Linux issue of this nature for a very long time, so please bear with me.
My Linux CLI admin skills are very rusty.
What is a better tool to investigate booting issues than dmesg?
To add more misery, the tty console on my laptop hi-res 4K screen has super tiny fonts.
My laptop has an Nvidia GPU, I have Nvidia drivers installed, from the Nvidia repo. I assume that Intel integrated graphics runs the shell normally. It used to work. I never had issues before.
I have UEFI with Secure Boot enabled. This laptop doesn’t have legacy BIOS anymore.
It’s a dual boot with Windows but I haven’t run them in ages.
I have disabled secure boot in BIOS, restarted, Lockdown messages are gone but I still cannot log into any GUI shell.
Clearly, the kernel Lockdown messages were red herrings.
The only error message I can still see is:
i915 0000:00:02.00: [drm] *ERROR* Failed to probe lspcon
lspcon, that seems to related to HDMI, so not a probable cause of X11 not starting.
About rolling back last working snapshot, you probably referring to snapper tool:
Bad luck. It looks like I haven’t enabled it or even installed it
I have all my partitions as Ext4 FS, not the default Brtfs; but snapper apparently should work Ext4 too. I didn’t know at the time.
