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Neil Bothwick

Neil Bothwick is Dr Tux to you! Fixing all problems dead(ish)!

Q  Minty screen trouble

One fine morning I turned on my laptop, fully expecting my trusty Linux Mint 19 Tara to emerge triumphantly on screen, and for brief moments everything looked normal but, alas, no desktop or beautiful GUI ever appeared! The Mint logo appears with the five dots as if loading the system, remains stuck there for more than a minute and a half, then goes into a loop: 

1) Screen goes black for 50 seconds 

2) Arrow cursor appears for 30 seconds 

3) Screen goes black briefly 

4) Horizontal blinking underscore appears top left on screen for about 30 seconds 

5) Screen goes black for 50 seconds, and the loop starts again

This seems to go on indefinitely. I have tried updating the system, but there seems to be no internet connection available, neither via Wi-Fi nor cable. However, the screen works fine from any live DVD, so there’s no problem with the hardware itself.

Any idea what causes this problem and what could be done to remedy it? I would like, if at all possible, to fix this without having to reinstall the system. 

Kaj Gornitzka

A  Ah, the curse of the pretty splash screen. It hides all the activity going  You can use the systemd journal to find out all sorts about your system – here’s a comprehensive list of reboots. on during boot, which is fine until something goes wrong and you need to see what is going on during boot. When the splash screen appears, press Esc to get rid of it, then you can see what your computer is trying to do and, hopefully, what is failing. 

As you mention, the hardware would appear to be fine and so this is likely to be a software problem. Did the networking stop working at the same time as the GUI? Did you have any sort of crash or power failure, particularly during a system update? The first thing I would do is check your root filesystem with fsck to see if there is any corruption: use the -f option to force a check. If there is corruption then you’ll need to boot from a live DVD so that you can run fsck on the filesystem while it’s not mounted.

The next thing to check is your update history, which you will find in /var/log/ apt/history.log. Do any updates to video or networking drivers coincide with the start of your problems? You sent us the output from running startx as a user, but this is subtly different to how X is started by the display manager at boot. Look in /var/ log/Xorg.0.log for the full log of X trying to start, and pay particular attention to any lines starting with (EE), because these are errors. I suspect there may be an issue with loading a driver.