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nahkhiirmees

Member

Registered: 2022-07-24

Posts: 274  

problems related to Daedalus, xorg and slim

From another topic:

Still banging my head against this Daedalus/xorg/libseat/slim-problem, kind of.
Sometimes, when using Daedalus desktop live, (modified .iso or  not, doesn't really matter) , i run into "login command failed"-complaint. And sometimes i also find libseat's complaints about VT 0, in text mode console. Found a quick solution:"chmod g+rw /dev/tty0 + add normal_user to group tty , with usermod". NOt sure if it is safe but it seems to work. At least when i have slim as windows manager,

Have been tryng to replace slim with wdm so that i get rid of a dm which has dbus as a dependency. So, farewell to "login command failed". But "libseat has a problem with VT 0"-thing has returned. Any ideas how to fix that?

it has been abt a week since i had this problem. Found a kind of a solution.
Then upgraded some packages w/ "apt-get upgrade -u". NOw it seems that i have some difficulties reproducing that "libseat tries to do smthing with VT 0 but cannot"-complaint. NIce.

Although i'm not yet 100% sure that the VT0-problem went away for good.

Also, i can boot the modified .iso which has wdm as display manager, with my new-ish laptop. But ofc my desktop refuses to boot it.
Maybe Ventoy has smthing to do with that booting problem.

abower

Member

Registered: 2024-04-19

Posts: 22  

Re: problems related to Daedalus, xorg and slim

Have you tried killing slim and restarting it, or not letting it start and then manually starting it? Could be a startup ordering and synchronization issue. Are you using sysvinit?

nahkhiirmees

Member

Registered: 2022-07-24

Posts: 274  

Re: problems related to Daedalus, xorg and slim

Yeah. With that modified .iso i can turn off(sudo /etc/init.d/slim stop) and remove (sudo apt -get remove --purge slim) slim. And install + start wdm.
Lately i even managed to install wdm inside that filesystem.squashfs .
I was going to ask how to make wdm work, how to get rid of those "VT 0"-complaints with that display manager,  but right now it does not seem that necessary.
Maybe there have been some changes in packages. It seems that not all change is bad.

But there's still the desktop-related problem, in the sense that the modified .iso won't boot on that machine.
And also,(when i boot into my desktop)  with unmodified .iso , i can install wdm/remove slim, with apt but slim still keeps running.  At least last night it seemed like that.

I use daedalus live desktop as a base for modifications so i think the init system is sysvinit.

Last edited by nahkhiirmees (2026-01-18 18:25:53)

abower

Member

Registered: 2024-04-19

Posts: 22  

Re: problems related to Daedalus, xorg and slim

The reason I asked wasn't as a workaround but to try to diagnose the underlying problem but thanks!

nahkhiirmees

Member

Registered: 2022-07-24

Posts: 274  

Re: problems related to Daedalus, xorg and slim

Most of this week i have been banging my head against combination "unmodified livecd+desktop_machine+replacing slim with wdm". Unsuccesfully.
But i managed to make 2 modified .iso images which work as intended or at least almost, with laptop.
Also today noticed that abt a month ago i made a modified. iso which kind of works with my desktop.
Could turn off slim and xorg.
Could also install and start wdm.

Couldn't remove slim though. Maybe because it seems that had a brilliant idea to erase contents of /boot inside the filesystem.squashfs to save some storage space.
There were some "could not access /boot/vmlinuz-*" -complaints when trying to remove slim with apt.

So propably i'm going to use that kind_of_works .iso as a base for future modifications. After reinstalling vmlinuz it should be possible to throw slim out of that root_filesystem.

Btw is it possible to prevent apt from changing vmlinuz or initrd during package install (or remove) ? Should that "apt pinning"-thing do that?

Last edited by nahkhiirmees (2026-01-18 22:52:06)

nahkhiirmees

Member

Registered: 2022-07-24

Posts: 274  

Re: problems related to Daedalus, xorg and slim

Fotrunately the complaints abt "libseat and VT 0" and "login command failed" have been rare lately. Maybe it is because of those new packages. Or absence of seatd.

Last edited by nahkhiirmees (2026-01-18 21:57:46)

nahkhiirmees

Member

Registered: 2022-07-24

Posts: 274  

Re: problems related to Daedalus, xorg and slim

It would be great if i could a) install wdm/remove slim inside that filesystem.squashfs and b) boot the resulting .iso with my desktop. NOt there yet but maybe some day.

I think that after that "chmod+usermod"-trick but before "apt-get upgrade -u" there was some kind of problem with wdm.  I got that "VT 0"-complaint, i mean.
Not disappointed that upgrade seems to have fixed that problem. Just hoping that it will not return later.

Last edited by nahkhiirmees (2026-01-18 22:50:21)

nahkhiirmees

Member

Registered: 2022-07-24

Posts: 274  

Re: problems related to Daedalus, xorg and slim

"libseat tries to do smthing with VT 0 but cannot"-complaint

The complaint has returned when i built a new .iso.
This time i failed to install some packages in right order, with dpkg, in squashfs-chroot-envinronment.
So, start from scratch and install packages in right order and the problem should go away again.

Should move on to using apt instead of dpkg. I think i saw somewhere instructions on how to make a local cache for apt.
There were also instructions on how to properly rebuild or repack a debian .iso , https://wiki.debian/org/$something , i think. Maybe Google knows the exact url.

NOte to myself, mostly, this message is.

P.S. this time i could log in with wdm, once. When i logged out and back in, xorg froze in the sense that mouse pointer stopped responding to actual mouse movements. Managed somehow to see libseat's error messages for a short while. The few seconds between power button push and the actual power_off_situation.

Last edited by nahkhiirmees (2026-01-22 02:21:50)

nahkhiirmees

Member

Registered: 2022-07-24

Posts: 274  

Re: problems related to Daedalus, xorg and slim

I wonder, does intel graphics chipset have some part in this xorg-problem. That Fujitsu's laptop definitely had problem with x and also intel chipset.
Should find out some details about my current desktop's motherboard soon.

Last edited by nahkhiirmees (2026-01-22 02:22:08)

nahkhiirmees

Member

Registered: 2022-07-24

Posts: 274  

Re: problems related to Daedalus, xorg and slim

There were also instructions on how to properly rebuild or repack a debian .iso , https://wiki.debian/org/$something , i think

In that case, something=RepackBootableISO .

Recently, the only way to make bootable .iso:s have been grub-mkrescue, and even that won't always work.
Maybe it is wrong parameters to genisoimage. Or maybe it is because the combination of usb-stick+Ventoy. Or maybe it is the processor or motherboard. Or maybe the fact that i do remastering inside of a vm instead of bare metal.
Maybe someday i can rule out at least the first of possible causes.

nahkhiirmees

Member

Registered: 2022-07-24

Posts: 274  

Re: problems related to Daedalus, xorg and slim

Should move on to using apt instead of dpkg. I think i saw somewhere instructions on how to make a local cache for apt.

Maybe something like this:

deb file://local/pkg/cache $distro main

as /etc/apt/sources.list will work? Have anyone tried?

Last edited by nahkhiirmees (Yesterday 19:45:55)