TLDR: Attempted to customise a keyboard layout using XKB, restarted and am now getting a white “Oh no something has gone wrong” screen on startup
I recently began using the “Programmer’s Dvorak” keyboard layout, as selected from gnome-settings’ “Region and Language” tab. However, I wanted to edit the key between LShift and Z (in qwerty terms) to be a backslash. I googled around to try and figure out how to do this, and got to Custom keyboard layout definitions - Community Help Wiki. Following its guidance, I went to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/
and used sudo nano
to edit the file entitled us
. Going to the definiton for Programmer’s Dvorak, I added the line (verbatim)
key <LSGT> { [ backslash, bar ] };
I am almost certain that I changed nothing else in the file.
I then wanted to restart X in order to see if this had worked. Following the advice of Ubuntu – How to restart X Window Server from command line – iTecTec (I realise that this and the last post are Ubuntu-related, but I thought that they would apply just as well to Manjaro), I ran the command
sudo systemctl restart display-manager
At this point, the screen went black for 15 seconds or so. Instead of returning me to the login screen for X, however, it brought up the “Oh no something has gone wrong” screen. At this point, I force-shutdown with the power button and restarted. I booted into Manjaro again and found the same screen.
This time I figured I ought to try to log in to TTY, so I tried CTRL-ALT-F1 through F6 and nothing happened. It seemed that the keyboard was completely unresponsive (I also think this because pressing CAPSLOCK and NUMLOCK do not turn on the LED indicator lights as they ought to. Also note that the keyboard definitely works in grub, so this is not a hardware issue.)
I tried rebooting again and strangely found myself stuck on the motherboard screen this time. I couldn’t boot even into grub, either by waiting or by pressing F12. At this point I took the machine apart and removed both the RAM and the CMOS battery, before replacing them. This worked (allowed me to get back to grub), but I was still stuck on the “Oh no” screen when trying to boot Manjaro. I also tried the fallback image to the same result.
As far as my own attempts to troubleshoot this have gone, I’ve looked around at other instances of this problem and they are typically caused by faulty graphics drivers or interrupted updates. I haven’t found anyone who encountered the problem in the same context as me (by which I mean that this seems to clearly be a problem not with the graphics but with Xorg, since that is the only thing I changed before this happened.)
manjaro-chroot
ing in from a live flash drive, I have checked the logs at /var/log/
and all that seems relevant is the following excerpt from Xorg.0.log
:
[ 51.361] (II) event1 - Power Button: is tagged by udev as: Keyboard
[ 51.361] (II) event1 - Power Button: device is a keyboard
[ 51.361] (II) event1 - Power Button: device removed
[ 51.361] (**) Option "config_info" "udev:/sys/devices/LNXSYSTM:00/LNXPWRBN:00/input/input1/event1"
[ 51.361] (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Power Button" (type: KEYBOARD, id 6)
[ 51.361] (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us,gb"
[ 51.362] (**) Option "xkb_variant" "dvp,"
[ 51.384] (EE) Error loading keymap /tmp/server-0.xkm
[ 51.384] (EE) XKB: Failed to load keymap. Loading default keymap instead.
This is the only error line I could see (although it occurs multiple times in the log) and the fact that it is keymap-related makes it seem very likely that my tinkering with XKB is at least involved in this issue.
I have also tried a system update, but there was nothing to do.
Thanks if you read this far.