I am currently without graphical display on my netbook installation of Manjaro's Enlightenment edition.

A few days ago I was working in E18 with an external monitor (turned on with ARandR with the internal LVDS turned OFF). These settings were applied to the session but not saved. Needing a Win program, I rebooted into Win without changing the display setting (and before closing ARandR). Later, having unplugged the VGA monitor, I booted E18 again. The graphical login was normal, but after login I was left without any graphical display -- with or without the the VGA monitor connected.

What I can do is operate from the command line. This does not allow me to open the displays or change settings with XRandR as I am not in an X session. However, XRandR does allow me to confirm that the moitors are detected (and VIRTUAL1 active). Environment variable $DISPLAY returns nothing (null). Setting display from the command line (DISPLAY=:0.0) and running E18 (exec enlightenment_start) still leaves me with no graphical display.

It is also possible to sign in to E18 as root and have a normal X session, although, obviously, without my profile, meaning for instance, that I am not set up to access my Evolution mail folders.

I assume that there is either a) a configuration file that is not set to monitors off or b) a damaged configuration file somewhere.

Examining Xorg.0.log and the log for entrance shows no errors. I have attempted to follow the configuration files that are readable (ASCII) and none of those seem to set monitors off.

I would like to be able to recover all my personal settings if there is a way to identify where the problem is.

If unable to do that, I might be able to save a configuration from ARandR to one of the profiles in my user directory, but which one?

If neither a fix nor a saved RandR configuration file work, the only other option I can think of is to add a user and move configuration files around.

Many thanks in advance for ideas to try.

As you can start the GUI as root, it may be that something has gone haywire in one of the dot-configuration files or folders in user's home.

The easiest way to test this is, as root, to create a new user with user privileges, then log in as new user and test whether the GUI works. If it does, the issue is almost certainly a corrupt dot-configuration file in user's home directory.

Do the test and let us know what you find out.

Thanks for the promp reply and, yes, as expected, a new account works.

I have looked at so many configuration files that I cannot remember them all. However, as I recall there are a couple of compiled ones that I could not read. Since I did not see problems in those files I could read, I assume it is one of the others.

I will try copying configuration files from the new user to the old not only to try to recover the old user home, but also to see if I can identify just which file is corrupted.

Entry error here!

Creating a new user allowed the solution of the problem! Details:

There are 10 files in folder "$HOME/.e/e/config/standard":

"e_randr.cfg" plus "e_randr.1.cfg" thru "e_randr.9.cfg"

Since these are saved with different dates/times, I assume Enlightenment saves the configurations so that it can restart without a reboot of the system. In other words, it is one of the nice error-recovery features of Enlightenment. In my case, however, having exited without opening the port to the LVDS, I was tripped up by the combination of the feature and my haste.

After creating a new user, I rebooted and signed in as root. When I found the above files I renamed all of them adding ".bak" in case I needed to restore them. (Note: This might not have been necessary had one of the .cfg file predated my error!) Then I copied the corresponding files from the new users home directory into mine. Upon reboot I was back up with with all my E18 and program settings intact!

Many thanks to frankbell and I hope that this helps some other Enlightenment user!