Rishi Giri
Dead Keyboard and Mouse - Xorg Issue

Iā€™ve been seeing /dev/sda1: clean followed by {x} files, {n} blocks from a long time, and every time I boot my system, the message appears.

There was a time when the screen used to get stuck at this point and I had to restart my system and press Enter key number of times so that the message can be skipped, and I can login. I got used to this habit of pressing Enter key. Never tried fixing the problem. Never bothered googling whatā€™s the matter. It didnā€™t seem important to me. Iā€™m lazy.

I cleaned up my system recently, but before that, I also had an issue and it used to appear along with the above message. The screen used to get filled with ^[[5~

/dev/sda1: clean {x} files, {n} blocks

^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~
^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~
^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~^[[5~

I think my laptopā€™s keyboard has some fault, but Iā€™m not totally sure about it.

Coming back to the real issue - I googled the problem and stumbled upon this question on Ask Ubuntu. The OP had the same issue.

One of the comments was -

This is a normal startup message. It lets you know that there are no filesystem errors.

There were some answers which pointed out that the issue is caused by the graphics driver, in their case - it was nvidia.

My system has Intel HD Graphics!

After a couple of days, my system crashed after logging in, and when I was checking the logs, I found out the Xorg had some issue. I donā€™t exactly remember what the error was, but after checking the crash reports, I saw

Xorg crashed with SIGABRT in OsAbort()?

I tried to fix it by doing (reinstalling the input drivers) -

sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-input-all

Next day, when I switched on the laptop, I wasnā€™t able to type the password. At first, I thought the problem is in my external keyboard, so I unplugged it, but this didnā€™t solve the problem.

I switched on and off my laptop several times hoping that somehow the problem will get fixed (hello?), but there was no luck!

Attempt 1

Problem

Login screen was completely blank. No prompt to enter username and password.

Attempt 2

I stumbled upon this blog post, which said

Problem

The solution didnā€™t work. Pressing Ctrl + Alt + F1 was useless, because again, nothing appeared!

Attempt 3

This worked for me!

I didnā€™t try to read other answers. Wanted to try my luck.

Issue Fixed!

I donā€™t exactly remember, but packages related to Xorg were broken. dpkg fixed it.


Links