Stuck in terminal, GUI does not start

Autonomous Machines Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson Nano
#1

Hi everyone! I’ve been working on a Jetson Nano, and my GUI has stopped loading after a reboot and I’m not stuck on a terminal login. While I can of course flash a new image, I’m looking to understand what happened.

My dmesg:
boot.log (60.1 KB)

So the last things I was working on were gstreamer. I was running the compiled tutorial codes that had video/audio and I did an export DISPLAY=:0 to make some errors go away because I was working on the nano via remote SSH. I installed a bunch of gstreamer plugins as stated
here.

I was also writing a Makefile before then that would compile all .c files in the folder and cleaning them. I think I could have accidentally did a rm -rf /bin here while defining the phony targets but the stupidity was caught by the OS before any damage could be done and it was never in sudo. I checked my root files and they are there.

Lastly, a bluetooth keyboard for the nano was under a bunch of pillows on the sofa. I’m wondering if ctr + alt + fxx could persisted some virtual console changes? If so how do I get out of it? I read about the virtual console sessions here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/547290/how-do-i-get-out-of-ctrl-alt-f3

I’m running my display to a HDMI monitor. I’ve tried using startx to force the GUI but it just hangs on the nvidia logo.

#2

Serial console would be the best way to see what is going on. This has the fewest dependencies and tends to survive a lot of failures. See:
https://www.jetsonhacks.com/2019/04/19/jetson-nano-serial-console/

If this is a Nano with SD card, then you can just look at the rootfs partition on your PC and see if “/bin” is missing. If this is the b01 revision using eMMC, then you could clone the image to see if “/bin” is missing. It is just a guess, but I think the logs got far enough along that probably “/bin” is not missing.

Virtual console would work if your boot got to console login stage (multi-user.target in systemd), but logs probably imply you never made it to that stage. Basically several text consoles are normally spawned which correspond to something like F1-F6 (or ALT-F1 through ALT-F6), and one of those is then replaced with the GUI (graphical.target in systemd on the default console). Logs of that default console would show reaching a login point and then being overwritten with a GUI, but I don’t see that.