On Mon, 2 Nov 2026 23:37:05 -0800 Donald MacDougall <[email protected]> wrote:
> Nov 2, 2026 6:34:22 AM Charles Curley > <[email protected]>: > > > > On Sun, 1 Nov 2026 23:25:25 -0800 > > Donald MacDougall <[email protected]> wrote: > > > >> I have an Acer Aspire laptop. I hadn't upgraded it in a long time. > >> It was still on bullseye which recently stopped receiving security > >> updates, so I decided it was time to do it. I upgraded to bookworm > >> which went swimmingly. Then I upgraded to Trixie which went even > >> better. I have been using xfce for many many years and it seemed > >> to work splendidly till I went to shut it down and found that the > >> "Reboot" option which had always been the last option on the Apps > >> list was no longer there, > > > > What "apps list"? > > Since I can't see it, from > memory (not too good anymore) I really meant > what you described below but the"Log Out" > selection was missing from the bottom of the "Applications" list, > thus I was unable to get the popup with six selections including (from > memory) Reboot and Shut Down as well as sleep and several others. Fair enough. A secondary problem to be solved after you solve your black screen problem. > > > I take it that you got a normal power up and were able to log in to > > XFCE. > > > As I described in my reply to Greg, I have always logged in at the > cli login prompt and then run XFCE by typing "startx". I've done > this for many years. Noted. Thank you for the clarification. > > After the upgrade to Trixie and after opening the terminal and > typing "systemctl poweroff" I was able to use the power key to > to restart, then login, then type startx and see my normal XFCE > desktop. But after I the "systemctl halt" command in the terminal > window I used the power key then logged in at the login prompt, > typed "startx" and saw no desktop, just the black screen. > > > > >> I had also > >> noticed the "halt" option in the systemctl man page and remembered > >> decades ago using the halt command to power down computers and > >> wondered what the difference is between that and poweroff, so I > >> tried it. After that when I started it up again, logged in and > >> typed 'startx', > > > > Wait, logged in again to what? In a normal Debian XFCE installation > > you log in to lightdm, which means you are already running X. > > As noted above, I have always logged in at the cli > login prompt then run XFCE by typing startx. > > So why did > > you type "startx"? And into what? Did you change from lightdm (on > > console 7) to a non-graphical console (1-6)? If so why? > > > > > >> instead of seeing the normal desktop, all I see is a black > >> screen with a mouse cursor in the middle which I can move around at > >> will but it does nothing. Apparently halt has changed meaning > >> since way back when. > > > > Or, more likely, you did something you haven't told us about because > > you didn't think it was significant. Which is why giving what you > > think are unnecessary details is sometimes very important. > > I have omitted nothing. I have described in detail the exact order > of everything I did. In your original post, you omitted the fact that you do not have lightdm (or any other display manager) manager running, and that you do the atypical "log in to a console, then run startx" routine. Which omission lead to some of the confusion in this thread. Since you described an atypical startup routine, I and others asked for clarification. > > >> > >> I'm on Wayland obviously with lightdm > > > > It is not obvious to me that you are on Wayland. How do you know you > > are on Wayland? Don't tell us that you are on Wayland (obvious or > > not). Show us you are on Wayland. > > Perhaps not. I've described my reasoning in detail > in my reply to Greg and will not repeat it. I likely was wrong. Noted. The gold standard for that sort of thing is to run a test in the terminal and copy and pasted the whole thing into your email, like so: charles@peregrine:~$ echo "$XDG_SESSION_TYPE" x11 charles@peregrine:~$ Note that I include the trailing prompt. That makes it clear that the one line of response is the entire response. I understand that you are using your phone for email, and that copying and pasting is problematic. I don't believe I've seen any response to a number of suggestions that you run the above experiment. -- Does anybody read signatures any more? https://charlescurley.com https://charlescurley.com/blog/
