Sabayon boots to blank screen

[edmund]

I've used Sabayon for a few months without major problems, then suddenly I found that it would boot to a blank screen. That is, after the "Booting the system" splash screen, a blank screen would be displayed, and no login screen would be displayed. The system would not respond to anything in this state.

I had the same problem early on in my Sabayon usage, and I was advised then to reinstall from the daily snapshot. This solved the problem then. This time it has not: I have installed the daily snapshot for LXDE, which failed similarly, then the one for Gnome (since this appeared to be more recent), which also failed similarly.

I am pretty sure this is not a hardware issue: I also have LMDE installed, and this works OK.

I can see nothing helpful in /var/log/messages. I would love to attach some logfiles, but have no idea which of the host of them would be of any relevance. I have waded through some of them and found nothing. This is absolutely all the information I have, until someone suggests which logfile they would like to see.

[sabayonino]

hi.
If you have ATI graphics card please see
http://forum.sabayon.org/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=27595
and
http://forum.sabayon.org/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=27577

[edmund]

Hi Sabayonino

Thanks for your reply. I do have an ATI graphics controller (an onboard RS780, for the record). Just retried booting Sabayon, and, strangely, it's all fine. I have no idea what changed between my last unsuccessful attempt and this time. (It couldn't have been any system updates, because I couldn't even get into Sabayon.) So, problem solved, but don't know how.

FYI I've gone through those other post you refer to, and I can't really tell what solved them, other than the appearance of various system updates. I had already tried playing with the xf86-video-ati package, but this hadn't done anything to help.

Regards
Ed

[edmund]

Oh dear, I spoke too soon. While typing the last message, Rigo was installing some updates - didn't pay too much attention to what they were - and now upon a reboot I find I cannot get into Sabayon: blank screen as before. (Rigo doesn't appear to provide you with an update history, far less any rollback functionality.)

Funnily enough, if I choose the 'recovery' option from the Grub menu, then press Control-D at the point where I can enter a root console, I get into Sabayon fine. I have tried to examine the differences between the 'recovery' and non-recovery boot options. As far as I can see, there are additional parameters passed to the kernel in 'recovery' mode: 'single' and 'init_opts=single'. I don't know what these do, beyond a vague understanding that they would set single-user mode, which should, in theory, prevent multiple logins on the machine. (I would understand this as allowing a single console session and nothing else, but clearly a lot else _is_ allowed in this particular single-user mode.)

Anyway, advice would be appreciated if anyone can provide this. Have to say I need to get on with my life rather than spend time on this problem. Clunky old Debian is starting to look attractive...