A few days back, I did an apt full-upgrade, including Debian sid. MNT Reform still boots, but after many boot messages, the screen goes black and no login screen appears. How can I debug this? Can I stop the boot messages before the screen goes black? Is there a text console, I might be able to access? Thanks!
Can you tell us more about your setup? What desktop environment are you running? Sway? What kind of login screen did you have before? How and where do you have your system installed? On sd-card? On nvme? Do you have access to a USB serial adapter that you could use to investigate your system despite the black screen? Are you able to somehow extract logfiles like /var/log/apt/history.log?
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Gnome with the standard login. gdm, I guess?
System is on NVME.
I don’t have a serial USB adaptor (yet).
Can I login somehow anyway?
You could dd a rescue system image to an sd-card, boot from that, mount your nvme somewhere and then fix things up or use that to recover your data.
If gdm is misbehaving, maybe disable it for now so that you get a normal tty login on boot instead?
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Yes, that sounds a useful advice. I had hoped for something even simpler, but that seems to be the way to go. Thanks!
Perhaps your screen brightness was set to 0 on last shutdown and this was saved/persisted?
Try:
<ctrl><alt><F1>
or
<ctrl><alt><F2>
to switch to a text console after startup.
Or add single to the kernel parameters.
Usually the parameters can be edited by pressing e in the bootmanager (be it grub or systemd-boot).
The Reform boots using u-boot. To add kernel parameters, you either have to change your ${bootargs} environment variable in u-boot before booting or re-generate your boot.src or your extlinux.conf depending on how you are booting.
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