Random shutdowns

[suivue]

@svavs

I logged in to kde and a black screen with a blinking underscore was entertaining me for a looong while, then kde loaded as usual. But in two minutes, while I was reading the OM welcome, the black screen came back and, after a little while, the kde login was presented to me again. At this point, I shutdown the system.

When powered on again, happened the same steps that lead me to a forced logout. I tried also the Failsafe X at login, without success: while writing in the terminal, boom, logout.

I have seen this, and I don’t have nvidia hardware. It happened on ROME. Initially there was no issues but after few days, I would be automatically logged out of plasma session and brought to login screen after couple of minutes as you mentioned. This was persistent, meaning rebooting would not fix it. But after sometime it became OK by itself.

Later, I had to reinstall ROME and the issue repeated in sequence (initially OK, then auto-logouts and later fixed on its own).

My workaround was to stop ‘sddm’ and manually start X.

• Login from any other virtual terminal (CTRL+ALT+F2)
• Stop sddm.service sudo systemctl stop sddm.service
• Create (or if you already have, edit) the .xinitrc file.

echo 'exec /usr/bin/startplasma-x11' > ~/.xinitrc

• Start X session manually with startx

When I did that, the session would not auto-logout. I could have disabled ‘sddm’ altogether but then would not have noticed the auto-fix

The issue could be intermittent or with a particular ISO build (I don’t remember which one I used) or an update fixed it (what got broken by an earlier update ). Not sure.

As for your main issue with random shutdowns, I don’t have much clue. However, I have experienced random shutdowns much like how you have described; difference is in my case it was an old-old-old acer laptop. It is currently resting in my attic. Yours seems slightly different in that you don’t have issue with other distro or Windows.

Have you tried using a different kernel? Either older or newer? There was a topic regarding wifi not working which got fixed with a kernel upgrade (rc-kernel). If you say there is no issue with other distro(s), it is worth investigating.

@svavs

Here, it’s saying Found Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS on /dev/sda4 and Found Windows Boot Manager on /dev/sda1@/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi that is not correct (the partitions are in /dev/sdb4 and /dev/sdb1, all OSs are on sdb*, only two data partitions are on sda*):

That can happen sometimes; the drive IDs getting swapped. That is why it is recommended to use UUIDs inside /etc/fstab. Reboot and run update-grub2. If not first time, try again. That should fix it.