After Screen Lock, inputting password gets me to a black screen with functional cursor

[unfortunately]

@soundofthunder

Tip: If you place that loooong box between 3 backticks ``` (top and bottom), that will create a scrollable preformatted text box, and keep it tidy.

I see… I supposed that is technically code. I’ll try that now.

Edit: interesting. On GitHub they called it “code”, here they call it “Preformatted text”. Either way, it really is much tidier.

[soundofthunder]

@unfortunately

On GitHub they called it “code”, here they call it “Preformatted text”.

Well, it’s technically preformatted text – all monospaced – like the html <pre>, for example. …aaaand, back to the Penguin!

[unfortunately]

It occurs to me that I’m not 100% certain I didn’t test the Screen Lock function again after I rebooted last time. If I did, I got back in using Ctrl+Alt+F2 and this breaks the Screen Lock function (until I reboot again), which may have tainted the results of those two earlier light-locker tests.

I’ll reboot quickly and redo those two tests just to make sure I get the same result.

Edit: the second result DID change. “light-locker-command -l” successfully triggered the Lock Screen function. Moreover, when I logged back in, I did not get a black screen.

Will retest this immediately, but if that’s the case, it would be a workaround; I could use the Lock Screen function via the terminal.

Edit 2: Confirmed! The command locked the screen, and I didn’t get a black screen when I came back.

So what’s different between that terminal command and the “Lock Screen” button on the UI? Why does one work and the other not? Come to think of it I’ll retest the button again just to be sure we didn’t somehow fix it too.

Edit 3: I used the Screen Lock button, no black screen!

How does that even make sense? I tried it after all those merges and it was still broken. And we didn’t actually change anything since then, I just gathered information and pasted it here. The only thing I did was call the screen lock function from the terminal one time.

Did it stick? I’ll reboot again, try the button before I do it via the terminal, and see if I get a different result.

For SCIENCE.

Edit 4: it did not stick. I rebooted, and the button still gave me a black screen. I rebooted again and used the command in the terminal, and got a black screen again.

Why did it work twice in a row two sessions ago?

[cscs]

With a quick look over there appears to be many unsupported packages. Some that do not exist in the repos or the AUR, some that are questionable …

For sure you will want to remove the ones listed below, after making sure to have the modern counterparts (and light-locker for good measure):

sudo pacman -Syu breath-wallpapers polkit linux-firmware linux-firmware-whence light-locker

sudo pacman -Rns breath-wallpaper gksu-polkit gtk-xfce-engine manjaro-firmware mhwd-catalyst mhwd-nvidia-240xx

I probably suggest lots of other removals as well … including gconf, lib32-gconf, openssl-1.0, mozilla-common, most or all of the old js* packages, and more depending on what you actually need. vertex-maia-themes does not exist anywhere either. Your ipw* packages also dont exist, but there is ipw2x00-firmware in the AUR … etc etc.

I still dont know if any/all of that will have the desired fixes.
But I do know your light-locker appears to be looking for a file that does not exist … while you have old packages, some of which have not existed for a while.

Its no lost cause … but its worth asking at some point if maybe it would be less pain or quicker to do a backup and clean install? It wouldnt be my first choice , but I have a hunch that it would work then (of course a Live USB can always be test-driven).
Only you can value your own time and all.

EDIT.

@unfortunately

Edit: the second result DID change. “light-locker-command -l” successfully triggered the Lock Screen function. Moreover, when I logged back in, I did not get a black screen.

@unfortunately

Edit 2: Confirmed! The command locked the screen, and I didn’t get a black screen when I came back.

@unfortunately

Edit 3: I used the Screen Lock button, no black screen!

Hurrah!

We can both be unsure of the mystery of the exact sequence of events, but if it works thats great.

What I said above about the old packages is still general advice though.

Some more of that …

@unfortunately

Machine:
  Type: Desktop Mobo: Micro-Star model: H370 GAMING PLUS (MS-7B22) v: 2.0
    serial: <superuser required> UEFI-[Legacy]: American Megatrends v: 1.10
    date: 02/24/2018

Your BIOS appears to be out of date.
If my search-foo is correct:
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/H370-GAMING-PLUS/support

@unfortunately

Partition:
  ID-1: / raw-size: 459.76 GiB size: 451.47 GiB (98.20%)
    used: 371.76 GiB (82.3%)

This isnt quite dangerous yet, but you will want to make sure not to tip in towards 10% free.

[unfortunately]

@cscs

What I said above about the old packages is still general advice though.

Can having old packages actually be harmful? I thought they’d just stay sort of unused…

I’ll check I’m up to date on those just in case, and I suppose I can remove some of these.

Are you sure about Vertex-Maia? It’s always been among the default available themes for me. I just reinstalled Manjaro on my laptop and it was there. The theme I use is actually one of the Vertex-Maia ones.

Reinstalling everything from scratch… I know it’s the “clean” solution, but oh boy is it a nightmare. Days and days of reinstalling things, of things not working like you’re used to and trying to figure out how to set things back to normal. I always dread doing that.

In the meantime I really don’t know what to do about this ridiculous black screen issue. Maybe they’ll fix it in a later update? Usually they don’t, but sometimes they do…

[cscs]

@unfortunately

Can having old packages actually be harmful? I thought they’d just stay sort of unused…

It depends. If it was a selfcontained application it might roughly work that way.
(themes are a pretty good example … though having an old one enabled could break stuff)

But some might provide services or configurations whose continued existence may contradict new norms.

@unfortunately

In the meantime I really don’t know what to do about this ridiculous black screen issue. Maybe they’ll fix it in a later update? Usually they don’t, but sometimes they do…

As sorta mentioned in the other thread … we arent really sure its a bug.
Given the myriad of ‘issues’ its quite difficult to say without checking something like a live ISO.

If it isnt a bug … then no fix will come. Your misconfigured system … will continue to be misconfigured.

I can offer another big hammer approach …

Using mapare we can reinstall all the packages that would come with a current ISO.

And we can run it sorta ‘remotely’ (wihtout having to download and mark executable, etc)

bash <(curl -s https://gitlab.com/cscs/mapare/-/raw/main/mapare) -IA

Type xfce at the prompt.

When that is done check your pacnews, but then you can consider every foreign package as disposable as you see fit (read: remove everything unless you really want it).

And then we can go over some other things;

sudo pacman -Syu install-grub
sudo install-grub
sudo mkinitcpio -P
sudo update-grub

That should be a pretty good jumping point.

Another hint: if your regular user is not fixed try with a new user, if the new user works then it is a home configuration problem.

[unfortunately]

@cscs

Your misconfigured system … will continue to be misconfigured.

Well, these updates change literally millions of things, so there’s no realistic way for me to figure out which one of these configuration changes my particular system might conflict with.

I read somewhere that there might be alternative ways to control these functions. Another manager might still be able to Lock Screen without triggering this black screen.

Ah well. That’s for another day.

Thanks so much for your help. I learned a few things and, after I remove a few of these, hopefully I might avoid problems in the future. I’ll have to remember to check for new .pacnew files after every update, too. Apparently they don’t happen super often (a couple a year?) but if they can break things, it’s important to know they might be a possible cause.

Thanks again.

Edit: as added information, I have tried switching to another user and using Lock Screen. I got the “black screen with functional cursor” issue there too. So it’s not a “home” configuration problem.

[cscs]

Hm.
So looking back at the profile

manjaro/xfce/Packages-Desktop · master · Profiles & Settings /...

and this other thread:

Xflock4 is not “seeing” xfce4-screensaver on Fresh Install

I just performed a new install and attempted to use the the shortcut ctrl+alt+del to lock the screen. Nothing happened. I went to the whisker menu and clicked on the lock icon. Nothing happened. I checked the keyboard application shortcuts and xflock4 is defined for ctrl+alt+del. So I attempted to run xflock4 from the command line. This is what happened: [cddrew@Orangekarat ~]$ xflock4 /bin/sh: line 1: light-locker-command: command not found 'light-locker-command --lock' exited with status 12…

It would seem that the current way is not light-locker.
Its since become xfce4-screensaver with light-locker commented out.
(Though in that other thread they opted to go with light-locker)

It also reminded me you probably would be launched the lock instead with

xflock4

Sorry I havent been using XFCE in some time so I cant check these things myself.

[unfortunately]

Huh. That’s odd. I do not even have xfce4-screensaver installed.

But I just tried xflock4 and it did not cause the black screen issue! Now, we know that’s not a guarantee (yesterday there were two instances where locking the screen did not result in that issue somehow), but as it worked on the first try, it’s promising.

I’ll try it again later, before and after I reboot, and if it doesn’t cause the issue then… that’s a suitable workaround.

Maybe there’s even a way to tie this function to my Lock Screen button.

[cscs]

Thats encouraging.

Extra info to go over here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xfce#Lock_the_screen

It appears you shouldnt really need to do anything extra as long as the lock being activated is xflock4, which according to the article should be true for the ‘Action Buttons’ in the panel.

If you have a key combination configured that may need to be adjusted/reapplied.

[unfortunately]

xflock4 seems to work every time. Good enough for me! I’ll see if I can figure out how to tie the button to that command, but until then, I don’t mind having to open a terminal and input that one word when I need to lock the screen.

I’ll mark it as the solution so at the very least, if someone encounters the same problem, they’ll also have a nice workaround.

Thanks!

Edit: mark, not make