Every boot on Gecko Leap Cinnamon, I see the below message:
failed to start setup virtual console
see systemctl status systemd-vconsole-setup.service
It seems to be delaying booting. Is there a fix?
I don’t recall seeing that recently. So maybe it was fixed. Or maybe I just stopped noticing.
In any case, you can ignore that message. It doesn’t seem to cause any problems.
That was fixed a long time ago. Is this a fresh Gecko install? AFAIK the project is completely dead.
This Gecko system was installed yesterday via an ISO I downloaded yesterday, so it’s as fresh as can be.
Maybe I should wipe the drive and install openSUSE Cinnamon instead. The reason I was using Gecko is that I tried to create a Cinnamon openSUSE system a couple of years ago, but I could not complete the instructions at https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Cinnamon. I don’t remember what the problem was. And openSUSE does not offer a Cinnamon ISO. If I installed via a Leap network ISO and did not select a desktop, then executed the below in the console
zypper ar -qry http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/Cinnamon:/Current/openSUSE_Leap_15.0/X11:Cinnamon:Current.repo
zypper ref && zypper in -t pattern cinnamon
would I end up with a working Cinnamon system?
I must admit, it would be nice if the openSUSE team would add Cinnamon as an option during installation.
I think I saw a bug report a few days ago – filed by the Gecko maintainer. So it looks as if the project is still alive, and preparing for Leap 15.1.
As you can see here GeckoLinux - Browse /Rolling/999.180607 at SourceForge.net, latest TW based images are from June last year. For a rolling release I’d call that dead.
There’s more: the first thread on their forums refers to the user being hit by an upstream ( in this case openSUSE ) bug. Where the bug has been marked as fixed in 2018… My gut feeling is a one-man-project that ran away from the single maintainer. Also, we don’t know whether the Calamares installer does things the way openSUSE’s YaST based installer does.
@OP: If you enable the online repos during install, you’d have access to the entire repos ( posssibly incl. Cinnamon ), but I don’t know if Gecko offers that option.
It’s a live installer, so it mostly installs what is on the live media. But when I last checked, it messed up the bootloader install. It did not leave behind the information that Yast bootloader relies on, so I’m not sure if the bootloader is properly updated after kernel updates.
In order to illustrate that systemd-vconsole-setup is only necessary for setting up a specific console font and keyboard mapping (and because the error annoyed me too), I once did this as root:
# cp -i /bin/true /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-vconsole-setup* # have systemd believe the service just returns without error*
# dracut --hostonly --force --no-compress* # rebuild the initrd and incorporate the change we made*
Problem is gone, and the system boots faster, especially on SSDs where loading an uncompressed initial ramdisk may be faster than uncompressing a compressed initrd. Caveats:
- Your system may not
boot on different hardware anymore; skip the »–hostonly« flag if you need initrd to remain generic. - You have to deal with the U.S. console keyboard layout; as some rarely use the text console and/or know that default layout by heart, it may not be a big deal.
[edited to add the correct path to systemd-vconsole-setup]
Thanks to everyone for their answers. I will build an openSUSE system and add Cinnamon. And I will remember unix111’s trick if the message returns.