Install problem (black screen)

[Anonymous]

Dear All,

I’m a fairly new Linux user but used Antix 16.1 for a few years on a thin client. Yesterday I installed Antix 19 from a base CD to my old IBM Thinkpad R50e laptop. Everything went fine (repartitioning the drive, distinct root and home partitions, set time, TZ, default user, root password, etc. and the installer finished just fine.
After reboot though my computer just hangs when the X system is expected to start. It never gets through this stage.
Clicking Ctrl-Alt-F1 brings up the screen of the boot process. Everything seems fine until the “Starting slim: slim” line, then the next two lines are questionable. They say:

/usr/sbin/tlp: 50:/usr/sbin/tlp: read_defaults: not found
/usr/sbin/tlp: 51:/usr/sbin/tlp: check_tlp_enabled: not found

Then comes:

Welcome to antiX. Powered by Debian.
R50E-wireless login:

If I log in either a user or root it is fine. I can even manually start X (startx) but it behaves strangely. Can’t use e.g IceWM, most icons are missing (represented by a blank icon with “X” written on them, etc.

What should I do?

The system boots fine from the CD, everything seemed to be working from the LiveCD, so I expected the same from a hard drive install too.

Tips? Tricks? Workarounds?

Thanks in advance,

Pumukli

[Forum Admin anticapitalista]

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Instead of startx, as user type for default (I assume you are using antiX-base and IceWM)

startx /usr/local/bin/desktop-session rox-icewm

Then once in X, try removing tlp and see if it boots to desktop correctly.

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[Anonymous]

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Thanks for the tip. It worked somewhat.
By typing “startx /usr/local/bin/desktop-session rox-icewm” rox-icewm started. The screen what I see is far from perfect though:

Now I see I think Conky on the right side of the screen. (I’m referring to the system resources monitor application, not sure about the name though.)

I got a gray background and an error message. The message was shown in my native (localization?) language, I try to translate it back to English here: “Error in loading the background picture. It can’t be identified the /usr/share/wallpaper/lines.png picture file format. Background has been removed.”

There are two “blank” icons on the upper left corner of the screen. They are “Files” and “Help”. The icons are blank: they don’t have pictures just a red X in the middle on white background. They are not functioning either. When clicked they say: “Failed to execute child process /usr/share/applications/antix/editor.desktop” Maybe it is a privileges conflict (regular user vs. root or something like that.)

The taskbar also looks miserable: basically a black line, icon of favourite applications is missing. If clicked the left-down corner a menu pops up, Control centre can be selected and brings up a non-functioning window with blank icons…

You suggested that I’d try to remove tlp. Where from and how should I remove it? Editing which file?

Thanks in advance,

Pumukli

[Forum Admin anticapitalista]

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To remove tlp, open a root terminal and type

apt-get purge tlp

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[Anonymous]

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Removing tlp did not do anything.

It seems that there was some sort of installation error and the session managers (or what the proper name is) had been installed erroneously, missing some icons, etc.

I installed lxde and it works fine! All the icons are present and clickable. Problem is: it did not solved the original problem, after a reboot the screen remains black and I must login from the console at first and type “startx” to be able to start the lxde environment.

I tried apt-get remove icewm, then apt-get install icewm, but the problem with the missing icons did not go away. On the other hand, lxde uses a different set of icons and whatnot and seems all right once started.

How could I reinstall the original antiX Session managers?

Thanks,

Pumukli

[Forum Admin anticapitalista]

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If there was an installation error, how about re-installing after checking the md5sums match.

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[Member Pumukli]

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I’m not sure there was an installation error, because everything went fine, no error messages, nothing. But the system behaves as if a few componenets were missing! This is why I suspect something went wrong during the installation.

I checked the md5 checksum of the downloaded iso against the given md5 value in the repository where I downloaded the iso from and they matched.

Is there a way to check an md5 checksum against the written CD too? (This old thinkpad can’t boot from a pendriive so I have to use the CD boot method.)

Thanks in advance,

Pumukli

[Forum Admin anticapitalista]

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When you boot, F4 at boot menu has a checkmd5 option

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[Member Pumukli]

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Bingo!
It seems that the install CD has at least one corrupted file.

One always learns something new (how to calculate md5 of installation medium in this case). 🙂

So it seems we found the culprit of the unexpected behaviour at last. I think we can safely say that “Case closed” and I won’t continue this thread unless the same situation arises after I tried the installation from a checked, perfect CD.

Thanks for the help!

Pumukli

[Author]

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