{"id":3829,"date":"2020-09-19T18:31:07","date_gmt":"2020-09-19T23:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/?p=3829"},"modified":"2021-02-14T08:48:13","modified_gmt":"2021-02-14T14:48:13","slug":"fedora-32-black-screen-after-login","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/information-technology\/fedora-32-black-screen-after-login\/","title":{"rendered":"Fedora 32 – Black Screen After Login"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I set the feature image for this piece to one of my holding my SystemRescueCD. When it comes to Fedora “you gonna need it a lot!<\/em>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While I will say Fedora has gotten oceans better since I last touched it, I must honestly say it is still horrible. Basically they put a desktop front end on a locked down server version of Linux and didn’t actually finish the “front end” part. It is still really expert friendly if you want to actually use it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I installed Fedora because of Pt. 10 of my CopperSpice series and I wasted most of a day trying to get Ubuntu 16 current repository stuff<\/strong> working with CopperSpice. That was even less successful than OpenSuSE. If you are establishing protocols for a regulated environment, you aren’t going to get CopperSpice to build with what is currently in the repos when it comes to Ubuntu 16. As everybody who has ever worked in the tightly controlled regulated environments knows, you can’t just go find something willy-nilly and install it. There is a formal vetting process. If you “just download and install it” no matter what “it” is or where it comes from, without getting it from the formally vetted repos, you are probably getting terminated and depending on what environment, possibly going to prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let me be honest and up front here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don’t know how anyone could “like” Fedora let alone love it. The thing really comes up short.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My experimental project machines are also my BOINC machines. When I’m not installing something new on them for an experiment they sit on a bench running BOINC looking for cures to COVID-19, Cancer, HIV, etc. Most of my BOINC machines have NVidia GeForce 630 based video cards in them because those GPUs tend to rule number crunching, at least on the projects I support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At some point I will publish Pt 11 and you can follow along to create your own issues. I did successfully build CopperSpice and Diamond. At some point I was going to try creating an RPM and possibly a container for Diamond. Since CopperSpice wouldn’t build on OpenSuSE, Fedora was the next least offensive platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a case of really bad timing here too. I had just finished building and testing Diamond. I decided I would just copy the screenshots and text files up to one of my NAS devices rather than walk the six feet over to another desk for a thumb drive. Low and behold I could see only WD MyCloud. The Buffalo didn’t show up in the file manager. I could open MyCloud, but it crashed when I tried to open my directory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Oh! They have this<\/a> problem!<\/em>” I said to myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I dutifully edited the file and rebooted. Login screen came up, I clicked my name, entered my password, and was greeted by a black screen with a flashing underline cursor in the upper left corner. Hitting return didn’t move it. You could type nothing. WTF?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Okay, it was the last thing I did and it does play a bit of a role during boot, maybe I fat fingered that? I tried every trick to log in as a terminal user.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“unable to get valid context for<\/strong> roland”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*^(*&<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mount an lvm under SystemRescueCD<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Booting my SystemRescueCD I then had to figure out how to mount a Fedora partition<\/strong>. In the terminal window<\/p>\n\n\n\n

root@sysresccd \/root % lvm vgscan -v\n    Wiping cache of LVM-capable devices\n    Wiping internal VG cache\n  Reading all physical volumes.  This may take a while...\n  Found volume group \"fedora_localhost-live\" using metadata type lvm2\nroot@sysresccd \/root % vgchange -a y volume \"fedora_localhost-live\"\n  3 logical volume(s) in volume group \"fedora_localhost-live\" now active\nroot@sysresccd \/root % lvm lvs\n  LV   VG                    Attr       LSize   Pool Origin Data%  Meta%  Move Log Cpy%Sync Convert\n  home fedora_localhost-live -wi-a----- 154.04g                                                    \n  root fedora_localhost-live -wi-a-----  70.00g                                                    \n  swap fedora_localhost-live -wi-a-----   7.85g                                                    \nroot@sysresccd \/root % mkdir \/media\/fedora_root\n\n\nroot@sysresccd \/root % mount \/dev\/\"fedora_localhost-live\"\/root \/media\/fedora_root\nroot@sysresccd \/root % fsarchiver probe simple\n[======DISK======] [=============NAME==============] [====SIZE====] [MAJ] [MIN]\n[sda             ] [Samsung SSD 840                ] [   232.89 GB] [  8] [  0]\n[sdb             ] [DataTraveler 2.0               ] [     7.27 GB] [  8] [ 16]\n[sr0             ] [DVDRAM GH24NSC0                ] [   545.51 MB] [ 11] [  0]\n\n[=====DEVICE=====] [==FILESYS==] [======LABEL======] [====SIZE====] [MAJ] [MIN] \n[loop0           ] [squashfs   ] [<unknown>        ] [   469.86 MB] [  7] [  0] \n[sda1            ] [ext4       ] [<unknown>        ] [     1.00 GB] [  8] [  1] \n[sda2            ] [LVM2_member] [<unknown>        ] [   231.88 GB] [  8] [  2] \n[sdb1            ] [vfat       ] [RED              ] [     7.27 GB] [  8] [ 17] \n[dm-0            ] [swap       ] [<unknown>        ] [     7.85 GB] [253] [  0] \n[dm-1            ] [ext4       ] [<unknown>        ] [   154.04 GB] [253] [  1] \n[dm-2            ] [ext4       ] [<unknown>        ] [    70.00 GB] [253] [  2] \nroot@sysresccd \/root % mkdir \/media\/myusb\nroot@sysresccd \/root % mount \/dev\/sdb1 \/media\/myusb<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
I also mounted a thumb drive with the label “RED” (because it happens to be colored red and I wasn’t feeling creative the last time I initialized it). I wanted some place to write stuff that would survive and be accessible. What good would be writing all of the information about how to mount a Fedora lvm under SystemRescueCD on the drive I needed to know how to mount? The thumb drive I could at least stick in some other machine to look at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now I had to navigate to \/media\/fedora_root and undo what I had done. Being the glutton for punishment that I am I tried commenting it out first. One can never have enough practice booting SystemRescueCD after all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It took a few reboots to realize this had nothing to do with what I did. Well, not this particular change anyway. One of the main reasons Fedora and its ilk are so ill-suited for desktop use is they tried to completely lock down the desktop without providing a complete desktop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This Black Screen of Death is Really Common<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
In a YABU distro you install an NVidia driver via the “additional drivers” or “ubuntu-drivers” methods and you forget about it. Updates continually do whatever it is they need to do. Life goes on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not so with Fedora. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most “advice” is to install the NVidia drivers via RPM Fusion<\/a>. There is even Fedora doc about RPM Fusion<\/a>. Okay, this should be properly packaged, right? I installed it, did battle with getting Boinc working (not a simple feat on Fedora!) and continued on with building CopperSpice. Things were smooth. Diamond built and ran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
diamond on Fedora – JustDarkEnough theme<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
I was having a good day. Just needed to copy all of this stuff up to the NAS. To do that I needed to reboot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What happened to me and many many others is the realization that any hiccup, like falling back to a default video driver, is grounds for throwing up the black screen under Fedora. Make a change to your .bash_profile and you are probably going to get a black screen. During all of my installing stuff to make CopperSpice build, a kernel update got installed. It wouldn’t run until the next boot which was a few days later. The updates from Fedora don’t bother to rebuild the NVidia drivers provided by RPM Fusion. Niiiiice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unscrewing yourself from this major hosing requires quite a bit of near expert skill or you can just read the rest of this post and find out where the cheese is hidden. <Grin><\/p>\n\n\n\n