TX2 Desktop Not Fully Functional

I have a TX2 development board that doesn’t seem to be booting properly. The Desktop comes up, but I don’t see the launcher or panels. I only see the main desktop area and a couple documents I have stored there. I’ve tried with a couple different monitors and I’m pretty sure it’s not just a display issue. I don’t believe those elements of the GUI are being created. The real problem is that I cannot do anything with my TX2. Shortcuts like CTRL-ALT-T do nothing so I cannot even access a terminal window to investigate. I can right-click within the display which brings up a menu that allows me to create new document or folder or change the background. Selecting the background does allow me to access the system settings and under displays it just says “Could not get screen information”. The cursors also seems strange to me in that it’s drawn as a “x” and not the typical pointer.

Does anyone have any ideas? Is there keypress I can use during boot that will give me access to the command line?

Thank you!

It sounds like there is an actual problem. Sometimes it is due to part of the filesystem being lost after a power outage when content being written is too much for the journal to revert, or simply due to permissions. To get to a pure text console from within the GUI you can try “CTRL-ALT-F3”. Each of the F1 through F6 belong to a terminal, and one of them is the GUI itself (usually F1, but sometimes F2…which is why I suggest F3). If in a text console, then leave out the CTRL and just use “ALT-F1” through “ALT-F6” to switch terminals.

Your best tool though is going to be a serial console. Serial console has the ability to survive a lot of the system when crashed and burning. You can even log from a different computer starting before Linux itself ever loads. See:
http://www.jetsonhacks.com/2017/03/24/serial-console-nvidia-jetson-tx2/

I also forgot…if you have wired ethernet connected, then you can use ssh to log in that way if basics are running.

Thank you for the information! I was able to get to a text console using F3. Next, I’m planning to investigate the serial console and see if I can discover where the problem lies. I’ll report back on what I’m able to learn and I’m certainly open to any tips.

So, I connected the serial console and am, admittedly, a bit overwhelmed by the amount of output. There are several error messages, but I really don’t know which are meaningful. I’ve uploaded a capture of the serial output from power on though GUI coming up. If you’re able to take a quick look and see if anything sticks out for you, I’d be grateful for the help.

capture.txt (84.6 KB)

Looks like you have an SD card, and that needed repair (possibly irrelevant since powering off without clean shutdown could cause this, and if you were not able to see the monitor then unclean shutdown would be intentional and not related to whatever causes the original issue…this could be unrelated and unimportant, but has to be considered):

[    4.078847] mmc1: new ultra high speed SDR104 SDIO card at address 0001
[    6.557386] tegradc 15210000.nvdisplay: hdmi: plugged
[    6.620894] EXT4-fs (mmcblk0p1): 1 orphan inode deleted
[    6.627512] EXT4-fs (mmcblk0p1): recovery complete
[    6.640983] EXT4-fs (mmcblk0p1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null)

How is the SD card used? What is the mount point?

There were some WiFi issues, but this too probably does not matter for this case.

This block is interesting, but I am unsure what to make of this. Maybe interesting to others:

[   11.151861] tegradc 15210000.nvdisplay: unblank
[   11.214674] CPU1: shutdown
[   11.217406] psci: CPU1 killed.
[   11.240807] CPU2: shutdown
[   11.243622] psci: CPU2 killed.
[   11.298592] CFGP2P-ERROR) wl_cfgp2p_add_p2p_disc_if : P2P interface registered
[   11.316920] WLC_E_IF: NO_IF set, event Ignored

Now that you have serial console access (or even text console), once it starts up and has failed to fully enable the desktop, can you post the content of your “/var/log/Xorg.0.log” (sometimes its Xorg.1.log) file?

Right now I’m leaning towards something on the SD card damage being part of your GUI desktop environment. Thus the need to know more about how it mounts, where it mounts, how it is used, so on. If the SD has any relation to the GUI, then the damage which was repaired (lost data via loss of an “orphan” node) has much higher odds of being what has caused this (but at least you’d know it is a software error and not hardware).

Actually, I don’t have an SD card installed. As far as I know, I’m running exclusively off the the internal memory on the TX2.

However, your thought about something getting corrupted on a shutdown seems to be spot on. I just learned that my colleague who last used this development system was trying to install PYQT5. Apparently, something didn’t work properly during the install and he simply removed power from the board. I suspect this may be the source of the problem.

I am attaching the log file as requested. Thanks again!

xorg (19.3 KB)