tomsaul Posted August 24, 2016 Posted August 24, 2016 First, I am generally not a Linux person, so pardon any silly questions here. I am working on an OrangePi Plus 2E with (recent) Armbian. It has been working fine with the Jessie Desktop for several weeks now. I generally am running it 'headless', so I'm not sure exactly when, but sometime between last Saturday and yesterday I seem to have lost the desktop (and autologin, ...). I see a number of messages on the console at boot, including 'Stopped User Manager for user ID 1000' and then removing 'slice' for this user. The system is operating fine, just not the UI. So, how do I get autologin and desktop back (other than a new install)? What might have caused this to happen? I think I saw that a system update was being loaded on one boot. How can I check this? I seem to recall seeing a note that these images were set to auto-update. Is that true, and if so, how can I disable? FWIW - I have done an apt-get update/upgrade, with no change in behavior.
wildcat_paris Posted August 24, 2016 Posted August 24, 2016 @tomsaul I am not using the desktop but just a guess/test sudo apt-get install --reinstall xfce4
tomsaul Posted August 24, 2016 Author Posted August 24, 2016 No luck for that - still no desktop. One other note - I am now seeing (noticing) a message about A start job is running for dev-ttyS0.device This message appears several times, with a countdown as it waits for the port. The user manager messages generally appear just after this gives up. I had customized the serial port setup on this system to enable the ports on the 40 pin GPIO header (and as I recall to disable the normal console port).
earth08 Posted August 31, 2016 Posted August 31, 2016 After installing xfce4 Have you given command Sudo startcfce4 This might work But need to give command on every start. Don't know of auto, If you find something than please let me know. I am on armbian Xenial server.
tomsaul Posted August 31, 2016 Author Posted August 31, 2016 So this does show the desktop when run manually. So the question remains as to what would have caused this to no longer be automatically started (and how do I restore that)?
manuti Posted August 31, 2016 Posted August 31, 2016 Maybe you need to reinstall a DM like the nodm or lightdm.
tomsaul Posted August 31, 2016 Author Posted August 31, 2016 Perhaps - but since this was showing the desktop (and doing auto-login) before, and spontaneously stopped, the main question is why, and what I need to do to fix it.
manuti Posted September 1, 2016 Posted September 1, 2016 Maybe something or someone changed the starts scripts and remove the line that autostart the desktop. If you have a bad or poor quality microSD card or power source is probably that during updates the start file ends corrupt and the desktop won't boot. You must have a file /etc/nodm.conf with this content NODM_USER=user NODM_XSESSION=/home/user/.xinitrc Or you can try just add in /etc/rc.local this line : su -c root startx Save and reboot your system.
tomsaul Posted September 1, 2016 Author Posted September 1, 2016 The system is running from the emmc, so if this is poor quality we all have problems. Power is not a problem (dedicated 2A supply, and unit generally only uses half that). I do not have a nodm.conf on the unit that is misbehaving, or on one that is working properly. If I manually run startx I get the desktop (same as if I run startxfce4). I'll dig around a bit more to see if I somehow killed some critical file in my home directory or elsewhere, but I suspect other causes. And FWIW - the nodm daemon/service is shown in various rc#.d directories. I'll check to see if one of its dependencies is having issues as well.
tomsaul Posted September 29, 2016 Author Posted September 29, 2016 FWIW - in case others have a similar issue, the problem was quite simple - the system 'disk' was full. Even though there was enough space to do other tasks, and start the UI manually, it apparently didn't have enough to start at boot. After space was cleared, it resumed working as expected. 1
manuti Posted October 3, 2016 Posted October 3, 2016 FWIW - in case others have a similar issue, the problem was quite simple - the system 'disk' was full. Even though there was enough space to do other tasks, and start the UI manually, it apparently didn't have enough to start at boot. After space was cleared, it resumed working as expected. Is a classic problem on Linux, so keep disk with a clean gap, maybe using CLI trash application like : trash-cli and using this with trash-empty commnad with normal an root users. I take mental note because in the future I'm sure this problem return.
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