Asahi Linux is a port of Linux on Apple Silicon (the M-series chips).
I’ve been using it fairly happily for awhile, but it booted into a black screen recently. I had a flash drive plugged in and I had also installed new programs using dnf (The Fedora package manager, which is the distro Asahi uses), and after some reddit searching it appears that the problem was caused by something having to do with dnf update. After restarting the computer, it showed the Apple logo, Asahi logo, and Fedora logo in sequence as usual, and then never booted past a black screen. Unfortunately I wasn’t really able to “fix” it, but I was at least able to get into a terminal screen, mount a flash drive, backup my data, and then do a hard reset.
On boot, press and hold FN + CTRL + OPTION + F2. This should take you into a terminal-based login screen. Login with your normal user credentials. Then plugin a flash drive. Identify the device name by typing lsblk. It should appear as /dev/sda or something of the like. You should be able to identify it by its’ file size (e.g. 32GB, etc.). Then, mount the device. First, you should create a mount point using mkdir, such as in /mnt:
Create a mount point:
sudo mkdir `/mnt/mydrive`
Mount the device:
sudo mount /dev/sda /mnt/mydrive
Copy files from your home directory (or wherever you have data stored you want to keep) to the flashdrive:
cp -r ~/* /mnt/mydrive
Unmount and eject the drive when done:
sudo umount /mnt/mydrive
sudo eject /dev/sda
Repartition the Hard Drive
Now, you’ll need to do a complete uninstall/reinstall of Asahi Linux by repartitioning the hard drive on your Mac.
I followed this tutorial video to help me repartition the Mac properly, and it worked like a charm. Then, I was able to go through the same process of reinstalling Asahi again and using my Apple Silicon machine with Linux.