So what did I do wrong?

I go my new A150L yesterday, and spent the afternoon playing around with it and getting it to look and work as I like. In general, I was happy with my new favorite toy.
But this morning, no love. My new baby didn't like me anymore, it would seem, and refused to boot correctly. More precisely, it showed the initial power-on screen (press f2 blabla etc.), then the acer splash screen (white background, green acer aspire one logo), then it switched to black background with a white mouse cursor in the shape of an X (working mouse cursor, so i assume the X-server was working correctly) and nothing else. Several reboots and leaving it running for a while didn't help, so I finally reset the whole thing with the recover USB stick I made earlier.

So now, obviously, I'm trying to figure out what I did wrong, so as to avoid this happening again. Here's the list of what I did:

Activated the right-click menu (xfce-settings-show etc.)
changed the default acer desktop to a standard xfce one (replaced 'xfdesktop2' instances with 'xfdesktop in several scripts)
set my prefered wallpaper (moved it to /usr/share/xfce4/backdrops)
installed skype from the fedora rpm package
installed nano from the 'add/remove software' GUI
changed 'user' to my preferred username (usermod -l)
added icons for the terminal and firefox to the desktop
deactivated the acer search bar (commented out everything in/usr/share/search-bar/start-search_bar.sh)
left the machine in sleep mode when I went to bed, resulting in a totally empty battery this morning

That's about it. Any ideas where I need to be more careful in future?

 

Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf, remove the line that says 'Option "DontVTSwitch" "yes"', then if/when it happens again you can press ctrl+alt+f1 to get to a console screen and try and find out what's failing.

 

"left the machine in sleep mode when I went to bed, resulting in a totally empty battery this morning"

I don't know, but I think sometimes a file can get corrupted when this happens...
Also, you can try repeatedly pressing on ctrl+C during a reboot to get to a shell,
(it will try and start Xwindows about 3 times, keep hammering on ctrl+C throughout)
type "sudo shutdown now" to get to a root mode and then run "fsck" to check your disk.
(and when it finishes type "reboot")

 

Actually, that didn't work. I tried ctrl+alt+F5, as i would on most Linux systems to get a command line, and nothing happened, so i tried all the Ctrl+alt+F* keys, to no avail. I assumed that function wasn't available in Linpus. Go to know that it usually works, though.

thanks, that may well come in handy in future.

 

Acer's Linpus only sets up 2 consoles. The first is a CLI and the second runs the GUI. If you had edited your xorg.conf like pointed out, then CTRL+ALT+F1 should get you to the first console. CTRL+ALT+F5 won't work, as there is no console there with Acer's Linpus.

Cheers.

 

I'd go for that as the likely culprit, of all of them; the Acer startup system seems to me frankly weird compared with most Linuces and I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a script lurking somewhere which you'd missed (and quite possible no-one else has noticed either).

Personally I use the desktop switcher app, and the machine comes back up in whatever desktop I left it in.

Mine only loses about 3-4% of battery left sleeping overnight; I wonder if the sleep function didn't actually work?

 

Done that now, thanks a bunch for the hint.

 

Yeah, I wondered that too. I did notice that the fan was still running, but I figured that was probably due to cooling.