[xubuntu-users] Blank screen period during boot.

Steve Litt slitt at troubleshooters.com
Wed Mar 25 01:03:35 UTC 2015


On Mon, 23 Mar 2015 20:29:34 +0000
Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie> wrote:

> On 03/21/2015 07:50 AM, Petter Adsen wrote:
> > First off, while booting, I guess after loading the kernel and 
> > initrd, the system becomes unresponsive and the screen goes black
> > for a long time (~30s) before systemd takes over and continues the
> > boot. Anyone knows where I can begin to look for the cause of this?
> > There is nothing in the logs that jumps out at me.
> 
> In my experience, all Linuxes have (always have had) a delay during
> boot when the screen goes black and the cursor disappears. I have
> never understood why this should be. I had for a long time assumed it
> was an artifact of me using older, slower computers, but I have also
> seen it on faster ones too.
> 
> New users are particularly taken aback by this, because it looks as if
> something is broken, and there is a tendency for Linux to be blamed.
> 
> Is the blank screen an expected behaviour? Is there a suitable
> explanation I can offer to new users that will persuade them that all
> is still well, and that the login prompt *will* eventually appear?

First, you could turn off splash and quiet in grub. Then, during the
actual bootup, as opposed to going into X and the desktop, they would
see lines of text cascade up the screen.

When udev gets run, there will be a brief blackout, then you see lines
of text start to appear again, and usually the text is a different font
than the original boot font.

Finally, depending on desktop environment, there may be a blackout
period when you go into X. Because some distros choose to get
networking up and going during X instantiation instead of during actual
boot, the computer can appear to be hung for a fair amount of time,
especially if booted away from your usual SSID. I'm pretty sure that to
ease the user's mind during that time, what you could do is have
whatever shellscript does boot level 5 GUI immediately throw up a
graphic that says "Your computer is configuring itself, stand by...". I
believe that will serve as a wallpaper, and perhaps in a later part of
the boot you can overwright that wallpaper.

If the user has sole physical possession of the console, you can always
boot to boot level 3 and then run startx. Ubuntu will fight you tooth
and nail if you try to do that, but there are plenty of ways to get it
done. I've done it.

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance





More information about the xubuntu-users mailing list