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