Graphics down? KDE shows no Desktop...

This one is nasty.

I updated to the current version with kernel 4.19.11-1. Now my MSI-graphics with AMD R7 360 OC 2 GB DDR5 now doesn’t even show the GRUB menu, so that does its timeout and boots with a black screen (I can hear the hard discs). Then it shows the login screen without a mouse cursor. When I log in after a few seconds the geometric picture shows instead of the usual blue desktop. Mouse cursor is now much too big. I can activate the little applet in the upper corner but see no way to activate the desktop.

With the on board graphics of my Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H (with integrated Radeon HD 4290)I see the GRUB menu. The rest of booting is the same.

I used the oldest snapshot to try whether that helps – nope, problem stays. When I boot MX17 or Mint, there is no problem on the machine. Ideas?

Oh, btw., happy new year to all here :-).

After some more thought, it seems unlikely that it is the system per se because the snapshot with 4.19.5 (which did work) changed nothing. Maybe some config file or other on ~/ ? On the other hand GRUB is on /, so…

After appears the Mouse cursor that is now much too big, and the little applet in the upper corner, can you Ctrl-Alt-F3, login as root and

# susepaste -n wodenhof -e 40320 /var/log/Xorg.0.log

and provide the URL here? You may need to install the susepaste command with zypper or yast first.

If you hit the ESC key soon enough the Grub menu should appear. If this succeeds, you may try to use the failsafe entry at the bottom of the menu, or edit any of the stanzas by striking the e key with the stanza selected. Once in edit mode, remove both quiet and splash=silent, then proceed. If this does not help at all or not help enough, repeat, but also append plymouth.enable=0 to the line that contains root= and resume=.

Also check in Yast Boot Loader and see if wait is set to zero or any other odd settings.

Do you have a proprietary video driver installed? If so you may need to reinstall it.

Done: SUSE Paste

But
Error: Can’t open display: (null)
Link is also in your clipboard
(It is not)

As far as I remember both quiet and splash=silent are not there, I usually want to see whether the messages show an error so I look at all that text.

I have to boot now and try your suggestions. Will be back. Thanks and happy new year.

I wouldn’t know how to start YAST, no menu bar and desktop, remember ;)? But the boot loader is set to 8 seconds. I know that because that shows with the on board graphics.

No proprietary driver but radeon. They all say it is better nowadays than the proprietary one…

Thanks and happy new year to you too.

This is getting nastier by the moment. Neither “Escape” nor “e” works while the GRUB menu should be displayed. With the graphics card enabled no boot occurs and the screen goes after some time in the “no signal mode”. In short, the box fails to start at all. Writing this from within MX18 since I can’t even start firefox in the tumbleweed session anymore, using the onboard graphics now. Can this be some global KDE configuration file? Reaching all the way to GRUB seem farfetched but both screens fail, while SDDM works… Sorry for the layout, the message board rejects firefox’s linefeeds while posting from MX18… Downloading Chromium…

Failed graphic card???

To run yast boot to to terminal mode log as root and run yast

Is everything normal when booted from a Live USB medium?

That’s what I thought too, at first. But while tumbleweed boots with the on board graphics, it doesn’t display the plasma desktop then either. Nor can I activate programs via left click or the little menu in the top corner.

Okay, will try that next. (Lets hope Chromium won’t mangle the layout too) ;).

This reminds me of a similar black-screen problem after fresh installs of openSUSE 13 and 42.x. — The problem was that my standard auto-login user wasn’t in the »video« group. I fixed it each time by logging into a text console and typing:

sudo usermod -a -G video yourusername

This allowed my user account to start graphical programs. After that, I’d reboot or have systemd start the required services for Xorg/display manager/GUI:

systemctl isolate graphical.target

Good luck, also a happy New Year. Cheers!

Knurpht – that was a darned fine idea. Wish I’d had it myself. Loads of kudos.

Umm, but it didn’t solve the problem in a straight way. Here is the story:

I switched back to the graphics card and plugged in an USB-stick with MX17 as suggested. Booted as it should, but then it bogged down with the screen-saver(?) / lock screen(?) picture of xfce and went to sleep or whatever. So I switched to console (F2) and rebooted.

This time I booted Manjaro – and ended in the same scenario with the system asleep. By this time I was convinced that the graphics card in some way “pulled down” the whole graphics stack so I decided to physically remove the graphics card to let the on board graphics do its thingy undisturbed.

When I tried to pull out the card I noticed that my daughter had left a HDMI cable attached to the port of the graphics card. Which was attached to the switched off TV with which she had watched some films. Uh, oh…

To make sure I started the system without the graphic card and everything worked like a charm, tumbleweed up an running like never anything happened. Even an additional menu bar was there which I had created blindly while playing with the desktop in hiding. So I put the graphics card back in and switched it on in the BIOS – ahm, without the HDMI-cable attached. Everything is back to normal. Phiuuu.

So: Case closed. Many thanks to everyone here, you all were a big help. And Knurpht is the man, of course ;).

Sorry to answer this late. All my users are not in the group video. As you’ll have deduced from the preceding thread my system works now and worked before the “cable crisis” without any user being in the video group – no idea why this is different to your setup.

Thanks for the

systemctl isolate graphical.target

hint. I read the man page of systemctl, “isolate” might come in handy some time later in my linux adventures :).