The officially official Devuan Forum!

Robin

Member

From: Georgia, USA

Registered: 2026-05-04

Posts: 7  

Website

Boots to Blank Screen

This is a little weird.

When I boot up Devuan (Excalibur), it ends up at a blank screen, and in order to proceed I must

Cntrl+Alt+F3

to bring up a terminal window which provides me a way to log in, then I must

startx

to reach a desktop!

I thought I had autologin enabled, which always worked until today. Did an update do this or did I mess something up?

And how do I fix this so I can just turn the 'puter on and go grab a drink, and return to a desktop?

Thanks

Camtaf

Member

Registered: 2019-11-19

Posts: 551  

Re: Boots to Blank Screen

Depends which version you installed....

I used to install from the live desktop, which booted to desktop, with sudo configured; nowadays, I just use the server version & install with XFCE, (no sudo configured).

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,899  

Re: Boots to Blank Screen

Which desktop environment, which display manager (or none?) and how did you set up autologin? It's usually in the display manager's config file (e.g. /etc/slim.conf) but there's also a way to do it with startx.

Robin

Member

From: Georgia, USA

Registered: 2026-05-04

Posts: 7  

Website

Re: Boots to Blank Screen

Apologies, I should have included more info in my original post:

I installed RefractaOS, Xfce, and installed it from the Live session, choosing auto-login at installation. It all worked just fine until yesterday when it started doing this. It effects everything, though, both OSes on both HDDs and even booting from a USB stick! So I went into the BIOS and made sure Secure Boot was disabled, UEFI-only is enabled (it was Legacy when the trouble started). That was supposed to fix it but didn't... I don't have Slim, but rather LightDM and all the config files in there are unchanged from installation.