[Cialug] requesting help for troubleshooting

[Todd Walton]

Like you, Hakan, I would suspect a problem with the video driver, or
something about the way X is handling that. I wonder if it makes a
difference if you first boot straight to runlevel 3 and then later switch
to 7, or if the problem is only when you're in 7, go down to 3, and then
try to go back to 7.

--
Todd


On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 2:25 PM Eyüp Hakan Duran <ehakanduran at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I am a linux enthusiast without a technical background. I have been using
> various flavors of linux as my primary OS since 2005, but I still feel I
> have lots to learn. I would like to ask your help in troubleshooting my
> following problem.
>
> I have a computer which I use both as a server and workstation. Host OS is
> Manjaro linux with 2 guest VMs on it. I noticed that if I leave the machine
> on SDDM login screen for prolonged duration (>1 week), it usually freezes,
> needing a reboot, which is hard to do remotely. Therefore, I decided to
> keep it at runlevel 3 (multi-user.target in systemd language) and only
> convert it to runlevel 5 (graphical.target) when I need to use it as a
> workstation, which is a few hours a day. The first part of the plan works
> well; however, when I try to switch back to graphical.target, something
> goes wrong. I have a black screen on tty1 with a responsive but useless
> mouse cursor. Neither KDE5 nor i3 launches when tried separately. tty2-7
> continue to be usable. Killing X server by ctrl+alt+backspace doesn't fix
> the problem. The only thing does is a reboot. Since both KDE5 and i3 fails
> to launch, I suspect it is an X-server problem, or may even be due to
> nvidia module/driver, but these are my speculations. I tried "journalctl -e
> --user" command, but the information there did not seem to be meaningful to
> me and probably indicated X crash.
>
> I am good at following instructions and very curious about figuring out the
> underlying problem here, if you are patient enough to deal with me. If I
> can solve this with your help and the machine continues to freeze weekly
> afterwards, that would obviously be very frustrating, and another problem
> to figure out, but I can only take one step at a time.
>
> Thank you so much in advance for your suggestions and patience with me.
>
> Hakan Duran
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