Solus failed to boot to the login screen (intermittent issue)

psymage

Earlier, Solus got hung up and would not boot to my LightDM login screen. I've actually had this happen a few other times since switching back to Solus at the beginning of last December. This time around though, I do have a picture from my phone of where it looks like it got hung up during the boot process (I had disabled quiet splash weeks ago). Thankfully, switching into TTY2, logging into the terminal and rebooting from there allowed to get back into my desktop on the next boot. It's an intermittent problem for me since it has only happened to me four times but still an annoying one.

Specs:

DE: XFCE
Kernel: 6.17.8
CPU: Ryzen 5 9600X
GPU: Radeon 9060XT 16GB
RAM: 32GB DDR5 RAM

brent

I'm curious--when you get to TTY and enter your user name and password it immediately logs you in to the DE? or do you type something additional?

Also it's curious there are no failures in output? Does it really freeze at cups.service? Or that's just a partial picture?

You can boot with TTY but not the ON button.
sudo eopkg check will show you anything broken....
...this a layman opinion and guess but I think your boot (/efi) is broken and you have to chroot https://help.getsol.us/docs/user/troubleshooting/boot-rescue/
make sure /boot is 1GB.

if this is some kind of weird nvidia thing I know little there.
hoping for a 2nd opinion here

psymage

brent

I can boot the overwhelming majority of the time just fine. It's just a sporadic thing that keeps happening. If the EFI was broken, I'd have no luck booting at all. That's why I put "intermittent issue" in the title. The only thing is, when I log into the TTY, I'm still in the terminal. I tried startxa previous time this happened after logging into a TTY and even that didn't load up a desktop for whatever reason.

The few times this has happened, I've been able to reboot without issues into my login screen like normal. In fact, when it happened earlier, I just did sudo reboot after logging in via TTY and seconds later, I'm on the login screen on the next boot.

If anything, I would suspect that it's Plymouth hanging up because that's still stuck on starting and I've seen problems with it on other distributions, but I'm not quite sure how to solve that issue if that's the case.

Original-Syn

psymage Have you tried disabling plymouth?

If you haven't you can follow the guide here to change the boot parameters and set plymouth.enable=0

That way you can test it out over time to see if that is the issue.

psymage

Original-Syn

I'll try that and see what happens. I didn't realize I could disable Plymouth like that.

Thank you!

Original-Syn

psymage Let us know how it works out.

psymage

Original-Syn

Definitely. I did add that kernel parameter to disable Plymouth, so hopefully that works. I think if I can go a month without this happening again, I'm probably good.

Also, would it break anything to just get rid of Plymouth altogether? I know its purpose is just to have a splash screen during boot, which is not exactly essential.

BuzzPCSOS

psymage Plymouth does seem to be uninstallable sudo eopkg rm plymouth. I did this on a dell Venue without any issues. If it has been disabled from boot parameters it could be easier to just leave it that way unless you are really pushed for storage space.
For peace of mind maybe check SMART drive data and fault check your drive.