Hang on splash logo while booting (was: Re: switch off auto-selection of text

[Peter Flynn]

On 26/12/17 13:57, robert wrote:
 > On 26.12.2017 14:31, Peter Flynn wrote:
[...]
>> (I'm also curious to know — in another thread, I suggest — how you
>> got Ubuntu installed at all, as none of the flavours will boot from
>> the USB for me — they all hang on the fourth coloured dot while the
>> Ubuntu logo is on-screen during bootup, apparently because the
>> video driver is mismatched. I found that Mint doesn't do this, and
>> it detects *and* installs *and* fixes the NVidia driver problems
>> *and* correctly updates grub, which no other distro would do on
>> this laptop). >
 > This is nothing I had much problems with.

That's astonishing. I have had nothing but problems so far. I have 
blogged about some of them at http://blogs.silmaril.ie/peter and there 
is a post from early Nov appended below with a summary

> It is some moth i did it for 17.10. I remember it consisted mainly of
> finding out which bios combination to use

That's certainly part of it. The Golden Rule seems to be to avoid UEFI 
at all costs. Before trying to boot *anything* from USB, enable Legacy 
Boot instead of UEFI.

I basically tried every distro I was familiar with: all the *ubuntu 
family, Bodhi, Mint, Fedora, Point, and half a dozen others.

The ONLY ones that booted from the USB were Bodhi and Mint. This is 
particularly disappointing, as I have been using Ubuntu and Xubuntu for 
many years, and wasn't expecting them to gag on something like a video 
driver before they had even booted.

Therefore the only systems I was able to install were Bodhi and Mint. I 
was interested in Bodhi because I use Enlightenment as my WM, and it's 
supposed to be built into the system. Unfortunately it's not: instead, 
there's badly outdated version they forked from E some years ago. But at 
least Bodhi installed, even though it failed to write a working grub to 
the SSD partition, so I had to force that on by hand, and get it to 
update the video driver manually.

Mint on the other hand sailed through installation, as I said: fixed the 
driver, installed grub, and updated everything.

Given what I report below, I am actually wondering if my XPS 15 has a 
hardware defect.  But returning it would mean wiping it and having to go 
through the whole process of building my data back after installation 
again; and I may have voided the warranty by installing Linux anyway.

///Peter

On 08/11/17 22:35, Peter Flynn wrote:
> A more accurate description:
> 
> 1. Pressing Esc when the splash screen appears makes the display go
>     blank and nothing more happens. Pressing keys does nothing, and there
>     is no mouse cursor. Basically dead, although the lights are still on.
> 
> 2. When it hangs, it can always be rebooted after power cycle using
>     Recovery Mode from the Grub menu. It asks for the disk crypt in text
>     mode, and continues to boot OK. Completing full boot from the menu
>     gets a normal graphical login and everything works.
> 
> 3. Removing 'quiet splash' from the Grub boot line goes to text-mode
>     boot, but instead of the screen being a 24-line 80-char monochrome
>     TTY, the font is smaller and it's in colour, like with a colour
>     xterm. Boot goes on for 40 secs then hangs. As it's not
>     copy/pastable, I wrote it down:
> 
>> Reached target multi-user system
>> [*] Started WPA Supplicant
>> [40.1000001] Watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#7 stuck for 23s! 
>> [gpu-manager:933]
>> [***] A start job is running for Detect the available GPUs and deal 
>> with any system changes (3 min 47s/no limit)
> 
> That last line gets repeated every few minutes. I understand what it 
> says, but it's obviously not able to report what the underlying problem 
> is. A stuck CPU is doubleplusungood. Then it spews out a little more:
> 
>> [242.652679] Tainted: G L 4.13-0-16-generic #19-Ubuntu
>> echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs disables this message
> 
> Then it goes back to A start job is running, and the whole thing cycles.
> 
> Hold down power for 5 secs and force halt. Reboot from Recovery, select 
> full reboot, and it's back in action. Normal shutdown, power off. Then 
> power up and it enters graphical boot, give the disk crypt, and the 
> Ubuntu logo white does start turning red until the third one, when it 
> hangs solid.
> 
> Once it was booted I looked at dmesg but there was nothing in there 
> about CPU#7 or any lockup, but that seems to have occurred after 
> runlevel 5 was reached. I then did a system upgrade from 17.04 to 17.10, 
> not something I normally do on my production systems, but in this case I 
> now regard the laptop as sacrificial. This upgrade has not changed the 
> behaviour, however: it still hangs in graphical boot as described.
> 
> It's of course possible that it is a hardware problem, I guess. But for 
> the first 2-3 days of use (new last week) it worked fine, being 
> installed with 17.04 without problems, and being shut down and rebooted 
> several times. Then this problem occurred suddenly and without any event 
> acting as warning.
> 
> ///Peter
> 
>