Excerpts from Joe(theWordy)Philbrook's message of 2010-07-09 04:17:22 +0200: > > It would appear that on Jul 8, Philipp did say: > > > Hey, > > I have this problem since a while but it got a lot worse with the last > > two kernel versions. Now there's an about 50/50 chance to see the user > > login or simply not see it. I don't have any login manager set up, so > > after boot there's simply the user login and after that I issue startx. > > It all works just fine,even if I can't see a thing, and once I issued > > startx everything goes back to normal, the screen isn't blank anymore. > > > > The machine has an Intel chipset, and I guess it's related to that > > and/or KMS, but that's as far as my guess goes. > > > > Maybe one of you knows something about that kind of issue? > > Don't know for sure but it sounds a little like the problem I just had with > my video driver... And my problem was definitely related to KMS... > > Do you by chance have an Nvidia graphics card??? > > In my case I have a new/used (new to me) PC with on board Nvidia. It's my > first Nvidia and I was caught by surprise when the open source driver > didn't work for me. And since it's designed for KMS it was being deployed > before I'd even installed xorg... This put me in a blank screen where if I > carefully typed the keystrokes I could log in to a console and issue > commands. But I couldn't see anything. I have no idea what this would do to > the X session you would initialize via startx, But as far as the console > mode part goes it was suggested that if I used the kernel option > "nomodeset" when I booted, I might get a more usable console session. > And for me it worked long enough to find out that I really needed the > proprietary nvidia driver. You can see more details of my experience by > reading the thread I started on Jul 4th 2010 with the subject line of: > > screen goes blank on reboot after 1st pacman Su of new install!!!??? > > Hmmnnn I just noticed that I said "pacman Su" on that subject line rather > than "pacman -Su"... Just goes to show that my brain is less than perfect. > > Hope this is of some help anyway. Thanks Joe, I saw that thread but didn't read it entirely. I have an onboard intel chip, KMS is working since quite a while, so it might just be a regression. I searched around for a bit and even found something on the arch wiki that might be related, but it lacks any reference to an upstream bug: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel#KMS_.28Kernel_Mode_Setting.29 Disabling KMS seems to be no option for intel chips anymore. Further search suggests that it might be ACPI related. One ACPI bug I reported was fixed, I can control my backlight with the function keys now, so maybe I should report this one as well. -- Regards, Philipp -- "Wir stehen selbst enttäuscht und sehn betroffen / Den Vorhang zu und alle Fragen offen." Bertolt Brecht, Der gute Mensch von Sezuan
