No start menu or applications when booting Endless from a USB

[Arilena]

Hello, lovely people.

First of all, great job on your help centre articles. They are actually really well-written. I haven’t found the issue I am encountering there or on the forums, so you’ll forgive me if I have missed it somewhere.

I used a bootable version of Endless on a USB flash drive about a year ago and it worked flawlessly for months. Recently, I burnt a new version of it and now when I boot from the USB flash drive my Endless starts but there is no start menu, no applications and the only clickable thing is the bottom-right menu where you can sign out, restart, turn off LAN or wireless etc.

I have tried making a bootable version of Endless using Rufus multiple times in the past few months and always encounter the same error.

Does anyone have any idea what might be happening here and how I can get it to work properly?

[egrath]

First of all, please don’t use Rufus for creating the Endless OS Live installer, use some tool which writes the downloaded ISO image raw onto the target media (in Windows: Balena Etcher or similar, in Linux ‘dd’)

For your actual issue: Do you use a multi-monitor setup? If so, can you please try to unplug the second display and verify if the menu button appears then. Additionally, can you please provide us with a diagnostic. Press Alt-F2, then enter gnome-terminal. A Terminal window should open, please run eos-diagnostics there and upload the generated file here. You can run the Chromium browser by typing: flatpak run org.chromium.Chromium

[Arilena]

Hi Egrath,

Thank you for your reply and the suggestions about other tools for burning ISO images. While I have been working with PCs since the times of DOS, I have very little experience with Linux-based systems :). It’s one of the reasons I wanted to play around with Endless.

I had the same idea as you about the monitors. I am currently using a laptop and an external monitor. I already tried unplugging it before booting from the flash drive since the odd behaviour looks exactly as if one were using a secondary monitor and was missing the menu buttons. Sadly, it made no difference. I am quite certain that when I first encountered this problem months ago I was using just my laptop’s screen, too.

I’ll try to burn Endless again tomorrow and try to provide the diagnostics you asked for. Fingers crossed .