[gentoo-amd64] Re: Systemd without migration

[Duncan]

mr_L4N posted on Sat, 28 Nov 2015 01:00:47 +0100 as excerpted:

> Unfortunately I've followed that guide and i can't log in console.
> Impossible to press any keys.

Please reply in context (under the bit you're replying to), so replying 
to you in context in turn is easy.  Here, I have your context, but it's 
still out of context because your reply out of context of the original, 
which was unfortunately below your reply, itself makes little sense.

So filling in a bit of that missing context, the problem is no keyboard/
mouse, in X, after installing directly to systemd, and ctrl-alt-F1 
doesn't yield a text console to see if the keyboard works there.

Now to try to reply to it...

Please also try ctrl-alt-F2 and ctrl-alt-F3.  Depending on how systemd is 
configured, X may actually be running on VT1, in which case ctrl-alt-F1 
wouldn't do anything since you're already on VT1.  But the F2 and F3 
variants should, as in that case VT2 and VT3 should be free.

If that doesn't work, try adding this to your kernel commandline options 
(in grub2 or whatever) before booting it:

rescue

That tells systemd to boot to the rescue target, which should give you a 
terminal prompt, with a message saying to either enter the root password, 
or press ctrl-D to continue.

Assuming you get that prompt, the next question is whether you can 
actually either enter the password or press ctrl-D there, in which case 
your keyboard is working fine at the text console.

If you can login to root, you'll be at the rescue target, which should 
have early services started and filesystems mounted, but will not have 
started the normal services that start with multi-user.target or 
graphical.target (which is basically multi-user plus the X/graphical 
login).

FWIW, when I setup systemd here, I configured systemd to boot to multi-
user by default, instead of graphical.  That way I get a text login with 
all services started but the X login, and can run startx from there, to 
directly start my desktop environment session of choice (a somewhat 
lighter than default kde).  It's up to you whether you want to do that as 
it is after all your machine, but FWIW I prefer the text login here, and 
it does sure help when troubleshooting X or DE related issues.  If that 
sounds useful (possibly even temporarily), you can set that up by 
creating /etc/systemd/system/default.target as a symlink, pointed at
/usr/lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target , thus overriding the shipped
/usr/lib/systemd/system/default.target -> graphical.target .

Anyway, once logged in at the rescue target, you can run:

systemctl start multi-user.target

That should start remaining system services and give you a normal text 
console login, without starting X.  Once there, you can continue 
troubleshooting X's problems, trying to figure out why it's not seeing 
your keyboard and mouse.

Alternatively, try systemd.unit=multi-user.target on the kernel 
commandline.  I've not actually tried it, but according to the systemd 
documentation (systemd.special (7) manpage), systemd.unit= can be used to 
override the normal default.target, which in your case apparently is 
currently pointing at graphical.target (the shipped default) as described 
above.  So this should boot you directly to multi-user.target without 
having to go thru rescue.target first.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman