There was a post last week about black screen on startup. I had the same thing and am posting for anyone searching for this problem.
My video card is a ATI Turks PRO Radeon HD 7570.
When booting I got the ‘light bulb’ briefly and then the screen was black with only a mouse pointer. Quiet by accident I displayed the System Activity (ctrl-esc) and then started poking around with my limited knowledge of keyboard launch shortcuts. Alt-F2 opened the search box and I found I could start various apps this way. Except for the desktop everything seemed to work ok. I tried messing with the desktop settings but had no improvement in my situation.
I started Yast and added fglrx repo and replaced the kernel mods from that repo. On my next reboot I actually had a usable desktop.
I got the same problem when trying under VirtualBox but I put it under VBox not necessary being up to date so to work with 4.x kernels. However, I installed it on a PC that worked fine with 13.1 and 13.2 and ran into the same problem. That’s when I found your post. I just used Alt-F2, open terminal and reboot, and then the normal display showed up. Since I have a GeForce 970 I installed the drivers too.
The problem seemed gone but something interesting happened. I’m used to multiple desktops, Pager showing in 1 row so I went and added 2 more, total of 4. All fine until I noticed that the default Desktop was always 2, not that it matters but I tried switching (animation set to Slide) and 3 showed fine, went back 2 fine, but then when tried 1 I got the black screen with the mouse pointer (and a blue small area upper left). Couldn’t do anything, mouse wheel did not switch desktops anymore so again I used Alt-F2, open terminal and reboot. I then removed the pager and added it again (actually I removed all desktop first, “lost” the pager since it has no width on the panel but found it hovering the mouse over the area in the panel settings).
Now the default desktop is 1 and switching desktops does not bring the black screen anymore.
I also have been having problems with a 4 screen pager. I haven’t quite narrowed it down but I think it is when I click on screen 3 that sometimes (not often) causes my screen to go black. I have now discovered that I if I open terminal and logout (rather than reboot), when prompted, I can log back in to recover from the black screen.
Also, I think the login defaults to plasma5, last time I had a screen problem I changed that selection prior to logging in, I cannot recall what the name of that selection was called.
I have a theory that KDE-5/plasma-5 does not play well with the radeon driver (or maybe visa versa).
After a successful clean install (ie new /home), some minutes into desktop use I had the black screen, with moveable mouse, and underlying OS (other than desktop) still functioning with much older AMD hardware (AMD-RS690 graphics hardware (which I understand is an X1200)). In my case to remain with the radeon driver I ended up disabling special desktop effects, disabling acceleration (via a 50-device.conf file edit) and removing all but one desktop. The laptop in which I encountered this is now very stable (with these restrictions in place) and running fine.
While I suspect problems are different, I think as time goes by we will have a better indication as to where a black screen with moveable mouse more specifically points wrt a failure (in LEAP’s radeon driver or Plasma/KDE implementation).
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Looks like KDE issue - I found some other comments online plus a couple of bug reports. Most likely not related to video drivers.
The problem seems fairly simple to reproduce:
open a terminal as superuser
try to shutdown or reboot from KDE menu -> the desktop is now replaced by the black screen.
will get warning about the terminal being open - do Cancel.
At this point we have the black screen with a terminal window only, no menu, right click, wheel, nothing - Alt-F2 still works.
A subsequent reboot will go back to normal (I suspect even log out / log in would do).
I’m going to put this under KDE lack of testing and try Xfce; I already did it on a couple of systems with very good results.
I might be wrong but I get the feeling KDE (and maybe Linux to some extent) fell victim to “gold plating”; instead of shooting for stability, reliability and performance we go after newest and coolest gimmicks.
I no longer can honestly tell my friends and colleagues using Windows to switch to Linux if they’ll be greeted by a black screen for a desktop or they have to wait 3 minutes for the PC to shutdown (thanks to systemd).
So why do you want to use the latest openSUSE 13.2 or 13.1 are still available and are stable and not prone to the problems in leap. Leap is NEW only a few days out of factory. But this is a community project so it is up to the community to test and feed back problems to the developers. If you want stability in the sense of the os not falling over then don’t use the latest and greatest. Leap is truly a leap in that the core is being synced with the commercial SUSE side and KDE plasma 5 is now introduced which itself is a bit shaky and will take time to mature. Over time I think leap will work out ok you are seeing teething problems. Personally I plan to sit on 13.2 for a while in maybe 3-6 months I’ll give Leap a try. May sit out the whole of 42.1 and see what 42.2 offers would not be the first time I skipped a release.
I tend to disagree. Most of the time it actually is a graphics driver issue IMHO.
The problem seems fairly simple to reproduce:
open a terminal as superuser
try to shutdown or reboot from KDE menu -> the desktop is now replaced by the black screen.
will get warning about the terminal being open - do Cancel.
Do not choose “Cancel”. This will abort the logout process, but plasmashell is apparently already closed, so you have a black screen.
Select “OK” to close the window, otherwise you can’t logout.
That’s no bug.
Btw, that dialog appears whenever you have some program running inside Konsole, not just for Superuser-mode.
It asks for confirmation to quit in this case, as you might lose data if closing the window by accident because those running programs would be killed.
To get rid of that warning dialog, activate “Do not show this dialog again”.
No worries. I’m not really convinced about blaming the graphics driver if it happened on my GeForce system from the start (nouveau driver) and after NVidia driver loaded, together with reports from other users with Radeon cards. Unless, we say there is a problem with all drivers and then logic would lead us back to KDE having issues with any driver.
As far as the warning dialog goes, I understand the purpose and also found how to disable it (but didn’t because I think is useful).
Nevertheless, this is not how things are supposed to work; in a good system or process the Cancel function should lead to the previous stable state not to some undefined state half-way between normal and shutdown. In other words, the plasmashell should not close until after the logout process passed the user interaction stage.
Finally, going back to the original problem statement, I’m thinking that should probably change to “plasmashell inadvertently closing” or “not starting” and either would be a bug in my book.
This thread originally was about a “Black Screen on startup”, not the logout “problem” you mention.
Nevertheless, this is not how things are supposed to work; in a good system or process the Cancel function should lead to the previous stable state not to some undefined state half-way between normal and shutdown. In other words, the plasmashell should not close until after the logout process passed the user interaction stage.
I agree that it’s at least unfortunate if the desktop is already closed when the logout is aborted.
This definitely is no graphics driver issue of course.
But it is a completely different problem than this thread originally was about.
Finally, going back to the original problem statement, I’m thinking that should probably change to “plasmashell inadvertently closing” or “not starting” and either would be a bug in my book.
I am another user with this problem (boot up to black screen). openSUSE 13.2 was doing just fine before upgrading to 42.1. I also have an AMD graphics card (HD6770), and I run the open source radeon driver.
I’m trying to troubleshoot the problem. I’ll report back if I find anything.
Here is what I can do: I can boot to a system console with no problem. Once there, if I run “systemctl isolate graphical.target”, KDE comes up with no problem. But, since there were no problems, there is nothing to troubleshoot.
If I try to boot the system normally, it goes to a black screen, so there is nothing I can do there, either.
Ok, my specific problem has been resolved. The guys on the #suse freenode channel had me set DISPLAYMANAGER=“sddm” in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager. Now, my KDE5 starts successfully from bootup.
I would rather not expect a problem with KDM, unless the installation (or config) is broken for some reason (if it’s not installed at all, display-manager.service should fallback to xdm).
That said, I haven’t tried it on Leap yet, so don’t know for sure whether it works at all.
I had the same problem, however the Alt F2 did not work, neither the delete .kde. Change from SSDM to DM, KDM etc nothing seem to rectify the problem, the screen stayed black with a cursor.
Then I tried cntrl+alt+backspace (many time), and could re-login with a window manager choice, LXDE was selected (luckily I installed it before), and LXDE worked, so I decided to stck with it. I then did a ‘upgrade’ but it complain about plasma, the choice whatever it was was selection 1, and on the next reboot it miraculously worked again.
Hope this help somebody.
Note: I encounter this twice, and on the first time re-install everything, I added a new hard disk and did a new install, but when it happened again I was not in the mood to install and setup all again. Indeed I gave up on my laptop to get a dual boot installation… that thread is also somewhere on this forum with nobody replying.
I been using Suse from 5.4, and this was the worse experience with Linux so far, icons are distorted, unmanageable, with black screens, not possible to install dual boot with win8.1 etc, unheard off.
System HP Compac, with 13.1 installed on old disk, this gave me years of endless joy.
In any case you should be able to get to the Login screen by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Backspace twice, and you should be able to choose IceWM there at least.
There was a problem with the KDE Frameworks5 update yesterday. Basically the necessary Qt5 update was not released in time.
To “fix” that, just update your system again.
This problem was a temporary one yesterday though, and is completely unrelated to the previous posts in this thread.
