Strange Black login screen - not possible to login

Hello,

i just wanted to do something on my lathe but i am unable to login. The standard login screens does not even show up anymore, but a black login screen.
Please take a look at the picture. I am entering my login details correct, but after clicking enter, nothing happens.

I hope my config is save and i do not loose anything.

Hope someone can help me out. Thanks in advance.

denhen89 wrote:

Hello,

i just wanted to do something on my lathe but i am unable to login. The standard login screens does not even show up anymore, but a black login screen.
Please take a look at the picture. I am entering my login details correct, but after clicking enter, nothing happens.

I hope my config is save and i do not loose anything.

What you're seeing is a standard text terminal (tty1). This means that for some reason your graphical environment did not start. It's clear from your picture that logging in works just fine though since you get a text prompt (cncpc@CNCPC:~$). You should be able to see your configs by typing 'ls -l linuxcnc/'.

Like tommylight says, try ctrl+alt+F7 to switch to terminal #7 which is often the terminal where the GUI is started. (Some distros start it on terminal #2, so you could try ctrl+alt+F2 as well.)

'startx' is another good suggestion - this should start the graphical environment. You need to be logged in first, as in your picture. Hopefully it will give you some error message that hints to what the problem is.

What led up to this? Did it work before?

@tommylight: Appreciated, thanks! You may write short but you reply to a lot more people than I manage to do. It's all good! Thanks!

Hi, first of all thanks for your replys.

I tried ctrl alt F7, but F7 is doing nothing, but all other from F1 to F6.
Then i logged in in tty2 and typed startx.
Now i have a blank black screen with a typing sign on top left corner, but its not showing anything else.

My Ethernet was not connected for some time so no updates could happen, thats why i dont understand why i have that problem.

I have tried it now also on tty3 and tty6.

I get what you see on the picture.

Yeah, a backup of your config files seems like a good idea. Another way to do that besides moving your disk to another PC is to manually mount a USB drive and just copy the files over. But you'll probably need to manually mount the drive since you don't have a graphical environment that takes care of that for you. It's not that difficult, but you need to figure out the device name of the drive. Something like this:

'sudo mount -o uid=cncpc,gid=cncpc /dev/disk/by-id/usb-<press tab here to see a list of the names of your usb stick> /mnt'

should do it. You can then

'cp -a ~/linuxcnc/configs/<name_of_your_config> /mnt/'

to copy the files to the stick. Finish with

'sudo umount /mnt/'

to unmount the stick.

To further diagnose the issue, one step could be to look at the X server log file (the X server is the "engine" of the graphical environment).

1) Reboot the PC to get a fresh log file
2) Log in to the text terminal
3) Find the file: for me the file is in ~/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log. On some systems I think it can be found under /var/log/xorg (or /var/log/X?).

Copy the file to your USB drive and post it here.

===========
To check the health of your hard drive you can run smartctl:
'sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda' (if your disk is named sda, which it will be if it's the only drive in the PC. Otherwise use the /dev/disk/by-id/<TAB> trick as shown above.)

You may have to install smartmontools first, e.g. under Debian/Ubuntu etc:
'sudo apt install smartmontools'