What did qubes do to my laptop?
Myron Weber
I have a Lenovo ThinkPad T460 laptop that previously had Qubes OS 3.1 installed and functioning, but I removed it and installed Ubuntu Mate because some of the things I needed to do (i.e. Skype) weren't easy to do on Qubes. When I read about some of the improvements in 3.2, I decided to try it. I pulled the Ubuntu drive and tried to install 3.2 this weekend to a new SSD. But I couldn't get it to install - just stuck in a reboot loop, even after I tried some of the UEFI bug fixes. So this morning I decided to install 3.1 and see if I could upgrade to 3.2. That's when things started to get weird.
After the 3.1 install completed and I logged in to the configured OS, the screen came up asking if a wanted to use the default configuration, and as soon as I touched the mouse, the screen went blank. Keep in mind this is the exact same computer that previously ran 3.1 flawlessly. What I found over the course of several reboots and a reinstall (which still had the same problem) is that after I logged in, moving the mouse pointer (with the trackpad, pointing stick, or external mouse) would cause the display to go blank. (I didn't get a chance to test it with an external monitor because of what I'll describe below.) By randomly moving the mouse pointer, the screen would flicker between black and normal, and if I got lucky I could get the screen to redisplay so I could see it. At that point, if I didn't touch the mouse, I could use the keyboard to interact with the OS. I launched a terminal, updated Dom0 - no change after reboot to the weird mouse/display thing.
So I was using a different computer to research options while my Qubes OS desktop was logged in (I had moved the mouse randomly until the screen was displaying). Then after a few minutes I noticed the display rapidly flickering - now not from normal to black but from normal to very bright. I found that the screen was frozen - no response to any keyboard or mouse. So I held down the power button for a hard shutdown. That's when things got REALLY weird.
When I restarted the computer, as the Lenovo logo screen came up, the screen was flickering as before and the exact Qubes OS screen that was displayed prior to the shutdown was displayed along with it - like a screenshot (but flickering) overlayed on the normal display. It continued all the way through the boot and login, then the screen froze and continued to flicker the same image. Over the course of several restarts, and going to the BIOS menu, etc., this flickering Qubes desktop was like it was burned into the screen. I was pretty freaked out. I powered completely down and put the Ubuntu Mate drive in, and even then the flickering Qubes ghost image displayed with the Mate desktop. At a loss, I shut down and got some work done with my other computer.
An hour later, I started it up again and the flickering Qubes image was still there, but fainter. Basically over the course of about 5 hours, each time I booted the computer, the flickering Qubes ghost image was successively fainter until finally it was gone.
What happened? What did Qubes do to my laptop?
cooloutac
wow thats weird.
cooloutac
wow thats weird. maybe something to do with your gpu or monitor.
Chris Laprise
glitch from a cosmic ray...
My advice would be to remove the battery and AC cord to totally
power-off the machine. But that's not easy now since newer laptops have
internal batteries. You should also check for a BIOS firmware update.
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Chris Laprise, tas...@openmailbox.org
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Myron Weber
> wow thats weird. maybe something to do with your gpu or monitor.
Maybe, but it's the same onboard Intel graphics and laptop screen that ran Qubes before. Not criticizing your idea - this is a mystery. I'll probably never know - hope to never duplicate.
Myron Weber
> Maybe someone is trying out Intel ME backdoor exploits? Or a freak
> glitch from a cosmic ray...
> My advice would be to remove the battery and AC cord to totally
> power-off the machine. But that's not easy now since newer laptops have
> internal batteries. You should also check for a BIOS firmware update.
Good points. In this case, because my 3.2 install failed, I had just updated to the latest March-17 BIOS from Lenovo yesterday. And the BIOS has a way to temporarily disable the internal battery, which I had done along with removing the main battery and unplugging - and it was like that for about 10 minutes while I switched the SSD back to MATE. But it didn't exorcise the ghost.
cooloutac
ya but maybe powering it off and stuff happening with power resources just started to make it wear out now. monitors do retain images, better ones retain them less then cheaper ones so probably somethign to that as well. maybe osmething overheated on something and was cooling off.
cooloutac
what "qubes" desktop were you running before switching back to mate, xfce or kde? I have had flickering screens with kde when using prop nvidia drivers though. In fact kde so buggy for me I stoppoed using it, But it happens, maybe something was going haywire with the machine when it was crashing and the monitor got stuck on the image till something changed temps.
Neal Rauhauser
>
> What happened? What did Qubes do to my laptop?
This does not sound like a Qubes problem, it sounds like an aging laptop deciding to stop for a much deserved rest. The things you describe are analog in nature - failing power supply, failing mainboard, failing video card, all might do the sort of things you describe here.