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toru

Member

Registered: 2020-04-12

Posts: 26  

Please help me troubleshoot lightdm not starting

I made a new install of Devuan Daedalus with the newest 4 GB AMD64 ISO, devuan_daedalus_5.0.preview-20220613_amd64_desktop.iso. I installed it with an EFI and bios-grub partition, a single linux ext4 partition, and a swap partition. I selected openrc, every desktop environment except for GNOME (I want to test them out to see how they currently are), and that's about it.

It seems to boot fine.

But when it should have showed the login screen, it just shows a blinking text cursor in the top left corner.

OK hear me out, I know I did almost nothing the standard way in this installation. But I don't think that this is a major/hard to solve issue, I just don't know how to solve it.

But when I was trying to solve it on my own, I found that "lightdm --test-mode --debug", when ran as root, makes lightdm appear. So lightdm works. It's just not automatically showing up for some reason.

On a much older Beowulf installation, I seemed to find that things like plugging in an ethernet cable for a connection that didn't have internet accss, and plugging in things into the USB slots before it boots, could cause this issue (or something like that). But none of that is the issue here.

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,486  

Re: Please help me troubleshoot lightdm not starting

First thing I would try is to run dpkg-reconfigure lightdm as root and set lightdm as the default.

Make sure elogind and libpam elogind are installed and check that consolekit and libpam-ckconnector are not installed.

Installing multiple desktops in devuan doesn't always work because there are some differences in how policykit works with the desktops and the login manager. By installing all of them, you are blazing a new trail.

toru

Member

Registered: 2020-04-12

Posts: 26  

Re: Please help me troubleshoot lightdm not starting

Thank you very much.

dpkg-reconfigure didn't fix it, but it seems to have turned out that for some reason I have consolekit instead of elogind (I don't understand why devuan keeps installing that, I seem to remember it gave me problems in the past too) so right now I think it's likely that this is the issue but I can't say for sure.

But apt-cdrom isn't finding my usb drive right now, I don't know why, it always used to work on older installs... I even tried putting the /dev/sdx1 of the usb stick (with UUID specification) in the fstab and confirmed that worked, but apt-cdrom still doesn't work. This is such a bizarre error... And it seems to stop me from fixing my polkit stuff.

Last edited by toru (2022-06-17 16:42:28)

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,486  

Re: Please help me troubleshoot lightdm not starting

You could install the deb packages directly from the usb with dpkg -i whatever.deb
In chimaera, I have elogind, libelogind0, libpam-elogind and libpolkit-gobject-elogind-1-0. Find them in the pool directory on the usb. If anything else is missing, dpkg will tell you.

toru

Member

Registered: 2020-04-12

Posts: 26  

Re: Please help me troubleshoot lightdm not starting

I tried installing the four files in the elogind directory, which were "elogind", "libelogind0", "libelogind-compat", and "libpam-elogind", but it tells me that purging consolekit is still going to remove like 200 things.

i didn't see a gobject or backend lib, even when using the find utility...

toru

Member

Registered: 2020-04-12

Posts: 26  

Re: Please help me troubleshoot lightdm not starting

I managed to boot my GUI using sddm.

If I get lightdm working, I might post how here.

I might should mark it as solved though, I don't know. Then if I don't get it working or don't post how I did, someone else will more likely make their own thread for it.

Last edited by toru (2022-06-18 00:05:59)

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: London

Registered: 2019-03-24

Posts: 3,125  

Website

Re: Please help me troubleshoot lightdm not starting

Did you check the LightDM logs?

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