N2600 laptop not working after update

sjuswede · 2024-03-11 15:14:17

I have an old Packard Bell Dot laptop with an N2600 CPU. When I install bunsenlabs x64 on it it works fine. It boots up nicely into the GUI and everything is smooth. Performance is perfectly adequate for the basic tasks I want to use the system for. Rebooting works fine, and the system comes up quickly.

Then I run apt update and upgrade, and things seem fine until reboot. When I reboot, the screen stays black. I can't switch to tty to get to dmesg, and the machine will not respond to anything except power off.

Booting into tty works fine, and reveals no problems. But the GUI simply refuses to work.

Any ideas what to do to fix this?

johnraff · 2024-03-12 01:11:20

If you boot into tty and then run 'startx' what error messages do you get?

sjuswede · 2024-03-12 13:21:30

I hadn't tried that. Tried it, and X comes up without issue. No errors. Rebooting will still not get me a GUI login prompt though.

hhh · 2024-03-12 19:15:10

Check if lightdm and lightdm-gtk-greeter are still installed...

apt policy lightdm

apt policy lightdm-gtk-greeter

Check status of lightdm...

systemctl status lightdm.service

If it is not "Active", enable and start it...

systemctl enable lightdm.service

systemctl start lightdm.service

... and reboot. If an error message comes up, post it here.

johnraff · 2024-03-13 00:29:43

Another possibility is that the grub menu is corrupted, so another thing to try is:

sudo update-grub

sjuswede · 2024-03-21 12:44:05

Thanks for the replies. I checked the lightdm status and all seems well, except it wasn't active. The policies show no errors, and results which look sane to me. The lightdm service is enabled.

I ran systemctl enable, and systemctl start, from tty, and the greeter popped up as expected allowing me to login. Everything worked fine.

On reboot, it didn't work. Same symptom as before. I get a few kernel notifications, I get a resolution change, and some more kernel messages, then the screen turns black and the machine is unresponsive. It does read the power off button and pretty much instantly shuts down when I touch it.

Restarting in tty, it comes back into tty fine. When I check lightdm status it still looks good, but isn't active. The status says:

Active: inactive (dead)

Running enable will not change this, of course. Running start will start it again nicely allowing me to login. This is perfectly repeatable.

I then tested update-grub, and it completed without errors. After reboot, the menu came up as it should, and the boot cycle is... the same. It ends in a black screen with a non-responsive system.

Last edited by sjuswede (2024-03-21 12:45:05)

johnraff · 2024-03-22 04:27:04

Try

sudo apt reinstall lightdm

Also, can you try to get a photo of the messages you see before the screen goes black?

#1 2024-03-11 15:14:17

N2600 laptop not working after update

#2 2024-03-12 01:11:20

Re: N2600 laptop not working after update

#3 2024-03-12 13:21:30

Re: N2600 laptop not working after update

#4 2024-03-12 19:15:10

Re: N2600 laptop not working after update

#5 2024-03-13 00:29:43

Re: N2600 laptop not working after update

#6 2024-03-21 12:44:05

Re: N2600 laptop not working after update

#7 2024-03-22 04:27:04

Re: N2600 laptop not working after update

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