[SOLVED] my PC stops booting : no gm, no keyboard

lalebarde · Last edited by lalebarde on Tue Sep 09, 2014 5:04 pm; edited 1 time in total

Hi all,

I am in a big upgrade process of my Gentoo box, from a 2.6.37 kernel to a 3.14.14, with in addition a lot of delay in packages upgrades. What I have mainly noticed is the replacement of udev by a virtual one, with its functionalities handed by systemd. I choose the default configuration of systemd when I made the kernel configuration from the old one, that is with openrc.

By experience, in such a big upgrade, I delay to the maximum PC reboot. I go as far as I can, until I assume rebooting on the new kernel is necessary. Then I do again revdep-rebuild, python-updater, emerge system, emerge world.

After many problems and 4 full days (and nights) of work (now I am questioning myself if it would not have been better to perform a full reinstall, but this is not the Gentoo way, and that is the reason I have been using Gentoo for many years), where I lost my twin screen, and got them back, where I lost X11 and back, I am now at the point where the boot process stops. gdm is not started, nor the keyboard. It finishes with a screen where it asks me if I want to know the reasons why X11 failed to start.

What I know from systemd, is that no service are started by default. So I have to add a say modules.conf file in /etc/modules-load.d/. But I am supposed to still work with openrc.

I have tried xdm, re-emerge xdm, gdm (this last one fails to rebuild). I really don't know now how to proceed. I write you now from a chrooted environment started with the LiveDVD :cry:

.

Everything is far from being uptodate, because with such an old upgraded system, the process is very difficult, but here are a few information that may help diagnose what happens:

eccerr0r · Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2014 3:27 am Post subject:

I suppose you ran into the XKeepsCrashing routine -so it seems like you still have problems with X11.

You should look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log and see if there is any useful information there. That is, unless it reports X11 as segfaulting. Since your /etc/X11/xorg.conf got modified, this is a hint that you may have lost your configuration.

I'm not sure, are you planning on completely switching over to systemd or are you wanting to just use openrc? If you don't want to use systemd I suggest you mask it and try to get it removed, it will cause headaches down the road even though openrc works now. Granted this may be an "advanced" portage task to remove it... If you're new with Linux it may be worth trying to get systemd to work then wipe the box when you decide it's not what you want or not worth the trouble.

I noticed you have USE=systemd now, was that deliberate or did you get that from a /etc/make.profile that uses systemd?
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

lalebarde · Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2014 10:35 am Post subject:

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

Here's the current situation :
gnome MUST use systemd.
So if you want gnome you must use systemd.

If you want avoid systemd ; you then must drop gdm and gnome. You will be able to keep using openrc and udev-systemd (that is just the old udev alone rename for propaganda, or use eudev) with other DE (mate if you want gnome2 like DE).

So make your choice first, and your upgrade path depend on it.
Right now you're trying to get best of both world (no systemd + gnome), alas gnome devs have removed you that choice.

lalebarde · Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2014 11:32 am Post subject:

Thanks krinn for your explanations. So I have the choice of no Gnome but systemd :twisted:

. Just kidding !
So I am going to remove all gnome stuff :cry:

and systemd. I have liked gdm because it was the only one I managed to make work with a foreign keyboard.

Then, what package do you advice for udev ?

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

Last time i tried (old version) except the name, udev-systemd was just udev, and ssuominen was doing the work as usual. So i couldn't tell you how udev is now, but i suppose ssuominen is still doing the work.
I have switch to eudev, because no doubt for me ssuominen is doing the work, but alas no doubt he keep the bad habit to do the work but stay close to upstream and some of his choices are for me errors (you shouldn't enable per default new naming shit, you shouldn't rename udev to udev-systemd and use new upstream path names... i have simply blacklist ANY systemd word from my system, so it's a problem when udev start using /etc/systemd/... shitty pathnames for itself).
Ssuominen is under two chairs, trying to make upstream happy and trying to make users happy. A position that could lead into being dislike by both ; in MY case, he has reach that point ; and from what i have seen, upstream is also not friendly with him anymore.
Upstream is working hard to make sure systemd can only be use, adding more and more tricks to brick othe solutions (like making mandatory to use /usr/bin instead of /bin to install critical booting program).
edit: and before you ask i'm happy mate+slim user now

eccerr0r · Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2014 1:18 pm Post subject:

The problem at hand is not systemd or udev or openrc, I'm just confused at your status of wanting one or the other. If you don't care, I think it may be easiest to just use systemd for the time being, then wipe the machine to get rid of it if you don't like it. Removing it can take some effort but if your goal is a working machine first, then removing it isn't the primary goal. That's why I'm a bit confused.

But regardless of systemd or not, it looks like your nvidia-drivers suddenly can't find the driver. I think the .so user space driver should be in /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/ - This should be there even if the kernel module failed to load (are there any other errors in Xorg.0.log?)

What do you have in your xorg.conf, is there things in there that don't autodetect? Just wanted to make sure that it's not trying to change module load paths, etc...
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

lalebarde · Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2014 2:05 pm Post subject:

lalebarde · Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2014 2:56 pm Post subject:

Reboot status : gdm launches (progress), but I have no keyboard. I unmerged udev for systemd (supposed to include it), but it should be alright thanks to virtual/udev, isn't it ?

lalebarde · Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2014 5:03 pm Post subject:

So, I have booted, I have a keyboard and a X11 session

.

What I did is:

mask and unmerge sys-apps/systemd and sys-apps/gentoo-systemd-integration
put -systemd USE flag at system level (/etc/make.conf)
emerge sys-fs/udev virtual/udev

Thanks a lot for your help eccerr0r and krinn

When I have time, because this mess has made me loose some days, I will clean completly my setup.