XFCE blank/black screen with cursor after login (solution)

Ethan R — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 21:21:56 +0000

Recently I had an issue where I would get a blank screen after booting up and starting XFCE from my display manager (LightDM, if it matters). No panel, no icons, no desktop, just my cursor. This began after uninstalling GNOME (and reoccurred after installing i3). As a workaround I could just switch back and forth between TTYs (i.e. Ctrl + Alt + F6 then Ctrl + Alt + F7) and that would finally start up my desktop. But today I have found a real solution.

The solution for me was to delete ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/displays.xml as suggested on the Arch wiki and on this thread from the Nvidia forums (this also seems to be an issue with multiple monitor setups).

Searching for this issue online yielded very little, and led to me only temporarily solving the problem the first time by deleting all of my XFCE settings as suggested on the Arch forums (do not do that, that is a pain to set back up if you've dumped as much time into your settings as I have). I only happened to come across the solution while reading the aforementioned XFCE page on the Arch wiki. So hopefully I've dropped enough keywords in this post to help the next unlucky desktop-environment-hopper or multi-monitor-power-user that searches for this issue, and if you're that person, thanks for reading.

Resetting the password of an Ubuntu on Windows installation

Ethan R — Mon, 24 Sep 2018 06:49:32 +0000

I installed Ubuntu on Windows quite a while ago, and today I found myself unable to remember the password I had used. It happens, and considering this isn't a bank account or a nuclear missile, I figured it shouldn't be too hard to reset the password. And good news, it isn't.

Resetting your password

Take note of your username on Ubuntu. You'll need this later.
In the Windows (admin) command line enter:
ubuntu config --default-user root
Load up Ubuntu with the ubuntu command. It should now show you as the root user. Now within Ubuntu enter:
passwd <your ubuntu username>
You'll be prompted to change your password. Go through the prompt and set your desired password, then exit from Ubuntu with the exit command.

Congrats, you're done. Now you'll probably want to set your user back to being the default user. Just run this in the Windows command line:
ubuntu config --default-user <your ubuntu username>

DEV Community: Ethan R

XFCE blank/black screen with cursor after login (solution)

Resetting the password of an Ubuntu on Windows installation

Resetting your password