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Why do I see a black screen with a random number on boot? (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/linuxquestions
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For reference I use MX Linux with Systemd enabled.

I'm pretty new to Linux and have been running this for around a month. Everything was perfectly fine until yesterday (7th) when, on booting, I saw a glimpse of the logon screen for a second and was then taken to a black screen with some white text that read "[7.300130]". Searching for this number doesn't bring up anything.

Eventually I found that I could get into a terminal here by pressing ALT+F1. I also found a lot of people suggesting that if you get past grub and then have a very similar problem (blank screen, flashing cursor rather than a number) then it could be graphics drivers so I uninstalled and reinstalled them to no avail.

Somewhat embarrassingly, the eventual solution was very simple. After I opened the terminal with ALT+F1 I could get back to the GUI with ALT+SHIFT+F7 and.. everything was fine.

Still though, whenever I boot now, I get a glimpse of the logon page, then the black screen with the number, and then doing the shortcuts above gets me back to the logon screen and after that everything is normal.

My first instinct is to say some update on the 6th must have caused this. I have checked /var/log/apt/history.log and I did run apt upgrade on the 6th but the only update was to mx-welcome which I don't think is relevant.

Although it's only a minor nuisance I would like to not have to do this every time I boot. Any idea what this is?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

That's the time stamp for that part of the boot process in seconds. There will be (should be...) text on the line to say what it was doing at the time.

Back in the day you could actually see the text but these days it flashes past so quickly that the timestamps are, IMHO, less useful.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That explains why it's useless as a code, thank you!

Any thoughts on why I'm being presented with the logon screen and then being given a timestamp after it has loaded?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I have never worked that out - it's probably to do with display modes/buffers being swapped around whilst the machine starts up.

Back in the day it was text only but these days you have systemd starting up all sorts of stuff and boot managers doing likewise... And something in the mess is either not clearing something or reusing something that it shouldn't.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If you run the dmesg -H command in terminal you'll see the whole boot log (might need sudo).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I'll give this a go next time it happens - thank you.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Just as a little update - I'm still not sure what caused it (although it does definitely seem to be systemd being a little odd because I temporarily reverted to sysvinit and it didn't happen) but today I ran sudo apt autoremove and after restarting the problem went away. It seems something left over by an old app just.. made this happen.