login gives black screen

I’ve been using 11.1/KDE 4.1 since Jan 6. Since Sunday I’ve had a problem. It boots fine. I get to the nice green and grey login screen, enter my password, press return then the screen goes white for a while, then it goes black with the KDE tip of the day showing in the centre. If I close the tip of the day a white rectangle remains. Ctl-alt-del pops up the logout/reboot/shutdown window. I reboot. If I do this a few times eventually I’ll get to my desktop. Any ideas on how I should go about fixing this?

Desktop effects are not enabled.

Coincidence can be misleading - but this has been happening since I once booted with the screen switched off.

Thanks

Shouldn’t matter if you boot with the screen off, i do that regularly. CHeck your video drivers are correct & installed properly

Andy

If I uninstall the video driver then all works fine. Reinstalling [x11-video-nvidiaG02 + nvidia-gfx-G02-kmp-pae] brings the problem back. My boot screen gives the default kernel as an alternative - using it and nvidia-gfx-G02-kmp-default gives the same issue.

try compiling the drivers instead.Sometimes you can get better results that way.If you get stuck or are not confident on doing this,let us know. The only problem you may get,is, when you do a kernel upgrade,you need to recompile the drivers.Do it a few times & then you will have no problems.Have a peek at the nvidia how-to here ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/180.35/README/README.txt or my personal how-to Howto’s

Andy

I gritted my teeth and followed your howto. All went fine until the Nvidia installer produced an error:

ERROR: unable to open /lib/modules/2.6.27.19-3.1-pae/weak-updates/updates/nvidia.ko for reading (no such file or directory)

I pressed on and then accepted it’s offer to run nvidia-xconfig and rebooted. No black screen after login - but then that was the case when I uninstalled the nvidia driver. So how to tell if things were working?

I ran glxgears which produced FPS >5000 which my browsing tells me is a good sign. However compositing, which was working before - now says ‘not supported’ - ‘XComposite and XDamage not available’

I tried sax2 -r -m 0=nvidia
that hung after the lines:
SaX: startup
SaX: X-Server: :0.0 -> grant

I spoke too soon - on login this morning I got the white screen followed by the black screen. So compiling didn’t fix it. I can use the system OK without the nvidia drivers installed so there’s nothing urgent - but it’d be nice to know what’s going on. Thanks for your help.

Very strange, i think you need to go to the nvidia linux forums,you willget a bit better help there NVIDIA Linux - nV News Forums

Andy