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  • Flickering/vanishing menu bar in Bookworm

    From bp@[email protected] to comp.sys.raspberry-pi on Tue Oct 27 00:51:17 2026
    From Newsgroup: comp.sys.raspberry-pi

    Following an unintended reboot my Pi5 8GB needed several retries
    before it booted. It looks like an accumulation of updates piled
    up and they all hit at once, with some very odd consequences.

    The first is that "high power boot" is no longer enabled, though
    hitting the power button a second time bypasses the error and
    lets the Pi boot from USB. Config.txt already contains
    usb_max_current_enable=1
    so the prompt to enable it on-screen seems very odd. The voltage
    on the GPIO power pins seems stable at 5.45 volts.

    It's much harder to get along without the Raspberry icon and
    menu bar, since that makes it hard to start applications in X.
    It comes on and flickers, icons and all, a few times before
    vanishing for good.

    Does anybody have an idea what might be going on? I found https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=345879
    but that's three years old.

    The machine comes up in command line, so I can log in, but
    am otherwise fairly clueless.

    Thanks for reading and any ideas!

    bob prohaska

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  • From Jim Diamond@[email protected] to comp.sys.raspberry-pi on Wed Oct 28 21:47:31 2026
    From Newsgroup: comp.sys.raspberry-pi

    On 2026-10-26 at 21:51 ADT, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
    Following an unintended reboot my Pi5 8GB needed several retries
    before it booted. It looks like an accumulation of updates piled
    up and they all hit at once, with some very odd consequences.

    The first is that "high power boot" is no longer enabled, though
    hitting the power button a second time bypasses the error and
    lets the Pi boot from USB. Config.txt already contains usb_max_current_enable=1
    so the prompt to enable it on-screen seems very odd. The voltage
    on the GPIO power pins seems stable at 5.45 volts.

    It's much harder to get along without the Raspberry icon and
    menu bar, since that makes it hard to start applications in X.
    It comes on and flickers, icons and all, a few times before
    vanishing for good.

    Does anybody have an idea what might be going on? I found https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=345879
    but that's three years old.

    The machine comes up in command line, so I can log in, but
    am otherwise fairly clueless.

    Thanks for reading and any ideas!

    Bob,

    I haven't seen anything like that, but have you looked at any of the
    following to see if there are any messages that might be informative?

    (1) The output of (sudo) dmesg ?
    (2) /var/log/syslog (assuming it exists on your system)
    (3) Any other file in /var/log which has been updated since the last reboot? (4) The output of (sudo) journalctl?

    Maybe you will see something by perusing some of the above which might
    point you in the right direction.

    Jim

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  • From Lawrence =?iso-8859-13?q?D=FFOliveiro?=@[email protected] to comp.sys.raspberry-pi on Thu Oct 29 01:32:13 2026
    From Newsgroup: comp.sys.raspberry-pi

    On Wed, 28 Oct 2026 21:47:31 -0300, Jim Diamond wrote:

    (4) The output of (sudo) journalctl?

    journalctl now includes a per-user journal as well, which can be
    accessed by an ordinary user without sudo, or explicitly selected with “--user”.

    All the GUI session error messages that used to go into the
    ~/.xsession-errors file before are now captured here.

    (And, boy, are there a lot of them ...)
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