X11 Xserver startup problem on a Raspberry PI

[Robert Heller]

At Tue, 27 Jun 2017 08:55:35 +1000 Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer at who-t.net> wrote:

> 
> On Sun, Jun 25, 2017 at 09:20:32AM -0400, Robert Heller wrote:
> > I have a Raspberry Pi (Model 2 B) running a fairly recent version of Raspbian 
> > (2017-04-10-raspbian-jessie.zip).  I have it start up to the console login, 
> > since most of the time I just ssh into it from another machine (either my 
> > CentOS laptop or desktop).  I just tied to login into its console (using my TV 
> > as a monitor) and using the startx command t fire up the GUI, but it is 
> > failing.  I *think* it is having some sort of problem with the input device I 
> > am using: a combo keyboard / trackball:
> 
> there are no error messages in the log regarding libinput, it all comes up
> normally. So whatever the issue is, I don't think that's it. the logind
> messages looked fine too, so that shouldn't be an issue either.
> 
> fwiw, you could easily verify it with sudo libinput-debug-events, if that
> handles the events correctly then the driver will too and you can mostly
> rule out libinput issues.

Well, libinput-debug-events does not seem to be installed...  What package 
would it be in?  dpkg-query -l \*libinput\* yields:

Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                        Version      Architecture Description
+++-===========================-============-============-===================================================================
ii  libinput-bin                1.5.0-1      armhf        input device management and event handling library - udev quirks
ii  libinput10:armhf            1.5.0-1      armhf        input device management and event handling library - shared library
ii  xserver-xorg-input-libinput 0.20.0-1     armhf        X.Org X server -- libinput input driver

> 
> "it is failing" is a bit generic, what exactly doesn't work?

The XServer does not start -- I type startx, and after a brief startup blather
and a brief screen blanking, it lands back at the shell prompt. The log file
is all I have. Yes, it appears that XServer sees everything, but for some
reason just exits after it has finished probing... No "obvious" (to me) reason
(I have seen Xservers die for various reasons, like bad video timing rates on
unsupported video chips, or totally missing mice and/or keyboards -- mostly in
the "bad old days" where one had to set things up properly in
/etc/X11/xorg.conf. I believe these days, one does not bother with
hand-crafter conf files -- the XServer figures itself out "on the fly". (Or
not as the case might be...)

> 
> Cheers,
>    Peter
> 
>                                 

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