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Why do I see a black screen with a random number on boot? (self.linuxquestions)

submitted 11 months ago by honeyontoast to c/[email protected]

6 comments fedilink hide all child comments

For reference I use MX Linux with Systemd enabled.

I'm pretty new to Linux and have been running this for around a month. Everything was perfectly fine until yesterday (7th) when, on booting, I saw a glimpse of the logon screen for a second and was then taken to a black screen with some white text that read "[7.300130]". Searching for this number doesn't bring up anything.

Eventually I found that I could get into a terminal here by pressing ALT+F1. I also found a lot of people suggesting that if you get past grub and then have a very similar problem (blank screen, flashing cursor rather than a number) then it could be graphics drivers so I uninstalled and reinstalled them to no avail.

Somewhat embarrassingly, the eventual solution was very simple. After I opened the terminal with ALT+F1 I could get back to the GUI with ALT+SHIFT+F7 and.. everything was fine.

Still though, whenever I boot now, I get a glimpse of the logon page, then the black screen with the number, and then doing the shortcuts above gets me back to the logon screen and after that everything is normal.

My first instinct is to say some update on the 6th must have caused this. I have checked /var/log/apt/history.log and I did run apt upgrade on the 6th but the only update was to mx-welcome which I don't think is relevant.

Although it's only a minor nuisance I would like to not have to do this every time I boot. Any idea what this is?

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[–] BenM2023 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

That's the time stamp for that part of the boot process in seconds. There will be (should be...) text on the line to say what it was doing at the time.

Back in the day you could actually see the text but these days it flashes past so quickly that the timestamps are, IMHO, less useful.

[–] honeyontoast 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That explains why it's useless as a code, thank you!

Any thoughts on why I'm being presented with the logon screen and then being given a timestamp after it has loaded?

[–] BenM2023 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I have never worked that out - it's probably to do with display modes/buffers being swapped around whilst the machine starts up.

Back in the day it was text only but these days you have systemd starting up all sorts of stuff and boot managers doing likewise... And something in the mess is either not clearing something or reusing something that it shouldn't.