Hi Guys
I’m busy this evening trying to upgrade a friends PC from peppermint 4 to Peppermint 5 and I a strange problem, which is when I log out the screen goes completely black and I have no means of logging back in again I have to power off then reboot then it will display the login screen ok, I’ve tried other greeter images but nothing makes any difference
any help would be much appreciated
Graeme
When you say “upgrade” … was this a fresh install ?
When booted to the liveCD will it logout without going black ?
LiveCD login =
Username: peppermint
Password:
When you say "upgrade" .. was this a fresh install ?
Yes it was a fresh install
When booted to the liveCD will it logout without going black ?
I’d love to be able to answer that but now it’s decided it won’t boot from the same CD I installed it with, but I’ll try to sort it out as quick as I can and get back to you
Graeme
Is this a laptop ?
Are you able to “from the black screen” drop to a console (Ctrl+Alt+F3), login in text mode, then run:
sudo service lightdm restart
and end up at the desktop ?
Ok I’m rebooting now to try that
but you won’t believe this when I tried to boot into same live cd I installed it with I selected “Try Peppermint” and it it took an age for the red progress to reach the end then it came up with an Elementary logo
anyway if things aren’t bad enough (Ctrl+Alt+F3) does nothing
I’m almost finished burning a new disc i’ll try it shortly
Graeme
ok I finally got it to boot into a live session and it’s ok no problem logging out and in again
Graeme
Do you think there may have been something wrong with the Live CD you used for the install ?
What’s the output (when booted from the HDD) from:
sudo lshw -C display
Are you able to "from the black screen" drop to a console (Ctrl+Alt+F3), login in text mode, then run:
(Ctrl+Alt+F1) brings me to the command prompt but
sudo service lightdm restart
just brings me back to a black screen
Graeme
See above
Do you think there may have been something wrong with the Live CD you used for the install ?
I don’t know this is working so well other than this one issue so it’s cast doubt in my mind if I was using the right disc
gordon@Gordons-PC ~ $ sudo lshw -C display
[sudo] password for gordon:
*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: RV280 [Radeon 9200 PRO]
vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
version: 01
width: 32 bits
clock: 66MHz
capabilities: agp agp-2.0 pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=radeon latency=64 mingnt=8
resources: irq:16 memory:e0000000-efffffff ioport:ec00(size=256) memory:ff8f0000-ff8fffff memory:ff800000-ff81ffff
gordon@Gordons-PC ~ $
Graeme
I’ve found the problem
It was caused by a .face image I had in the home folder I removed it and it’s logging out and in no problem :-[
Sorry about that
Graeme
Nope I was wrong it worked for a glorious moment when i removed the face image but it’s decided not to work again 
off to bed 
Graeme
Cool and bloody hell at the same time … who’d have expected that :o
[EDIT]
OK, ignore that then.
Is there no fglrx drivers being offered by “Additional Drivers” ?
What happens if you log into the guest account and log out ?
Is there no fglrx drivers being offered by "Additional Drivers" ?
No
What happens if you log into the guest account and log out ?
It’s just the same
but I installed fglrx from the repos after which I couldnt get a decent resolution whatever I did and the ATI control centre was telling me I didn’t have an ATI card installed (which I did) or the wrong driver was installed, so i uninstalled fglrx and the card and installed an Nvidia FX5900 but that made no difference either even after installing the proprietary driver, I then tried reinstalling lightdm and I noticed that the green box beside it had an exclamation mark inside it indicating an error and the option to reinstall was greyed out but there was an option to upgrade so I did that and it popped up some error message which i cant remember but it removed the exclamation mark and i had a green box but that still didn’t work, in a final act of desperation, I installed Pantheon greeter as per the instructions you gave me previously but need I say it that doesn’t work either, I’ve also tried various resolutions in the monitor settings
I’ve tried using a different background image in /etc/lightdm/lightdm-greeter.conf and tried uncommenting out the background image completely all to no avail, I also compared the file against the same file on my own PC and it’s exactly the same word for word
So I’m all out of ideas, I just hope you’re not
Graeme
To put closure on this I reinstalled Peppermint 5 and all’s well
For all it’s worth I think the problem was caused by a bad graphics card that was installed in the PC during installation, although I replaced the card after installation I think the bad card corrupted the installation in some way and I don’t think this was fixable but I suppose we.ll never know for sure, anyway it’s sorted now
Many thanks
Graeme
You’re probably right … mixed up graphics, and we could have been at it for days and still never figured it out.
Anyway … all’s well that … blah.blah,blah…
Just noticed it would have been shorter to just end that sentence properly :
Just noticed it would have been shorter to just end that sentence properly
Yeah why use 8 letters when you can use 12
Graeme