I inherited support of a server running Leap. It is supposed to boot to a graphical display with login options. It does not.
It boots to a black screen with a large mouse cursor.
I can CTL-ALT-F1, log in as root, init-3 and startx and the graphical desktop loads fine. If I log in as any of the other 6 users on the system the startx fails.
My Linux skills are old. I’m sure it’s a simple fix but I have not found it yet.
Additionally, if I do an update install on Leap everything works just fine.
I have the two test servers side by side now and I’m trying to track down what configuration file or files are suspect but not having any luck just yet.
Can someone tell me procedures from when linux starts the graphical load ?
I inherited support of a server running Leap. It is supposed to boot to a graphical display with login options. It does not.
It boots to a black screen with a large mouse cursor.
I can CTL-ALT-F1, log in as root, init-3 and startx and the graphical desktop loads fine. If I log in as any of the other 6 users on the system the startx fails.
My Linux skills are old. I’m sure it’s a simple fix but I have not found it yet.
Additionally, if I do an update install on Leap everything works just fine.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by this? Is the updated server booting to a complete functioning desktop? Login screen?
I have the two test servers side by side now and I’m trying to track down what configuration file or files are suspect but not having any luck just yet.
Information about the display manager might be useful…
systemctl status display-manager
Is auto-login configured?
grep "AUTO" /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager
Can someone tell me procedures from when linux starts the graphical load ?
Or can someone help point me in a direction ?
Thanks
To get an overview of the execution tree of systemd units (current init system) do
sudo systemd-analyze critical-chain
You’ll see that display-manager.service is triggered by graphical.target
sudo systemctl cat graphical.target
# /usr/lib/systemd/system/graphical.target
# This file is part of systemd.
#
# systemd is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
# under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
[Unit]
Description=Graphical Interface
Documentation=man:systemd.special(7)
Requires=multi-user.target
Wants=display-manager.service
Conflicts=rescue.service rescue.target
After=multi-user.target rescue.service rescue.target display-manager.service
AllowIsolate=yes
In answer to your first response, I do have two servers next to each other. One in it’s original state of not working correctly and one that works correctly after an ‘update’ install of Leap.
systemctl status display-manager
● display-manager.service - X Display Manager
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/display-manager.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: inactive (dead) since Wed 2018-09-26 19:27:41 MDT; 8min ago
Process: 1611 ExecStop=/usr/lib/X11/display-manager stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Process: 1254 ExecStart=/usr/lib/X11/display-manager start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Main PID: 1383 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Sep 26 19:26:12 hms-agserver64 sddm-helper[1463]: [PAM] Starting…
Sep 26 19:26:12 hms-agserver64 sddm-helper[1463]: [PAM] Authenticating…
Sep 26 19:26:12 hms-agserver64 sddm-helper[1463]: [PAM] returning.
Sep 26 19:26:12 hms-agserver64 sddm[1383]: Authenticated successfully
Sep 26 19:26:12 hms-agserver64 sddm-helper[1463]: pam_unix(sddm-autologin:session): session opened for user appgen by (uid=0)
Sep 26 19:26:32 hms-agserver64 sddm[1383]: Session started
Sep 26 19:26:33 hms-agserver64 sddm[1383]: Auth: sddm-helper exited with 1
Sep 26 19:27:41 hms-agserver64 systemd[1]: Stopping X Display Manager…
Sep 26 19:27:41 hms-agserver64 display-manager[1611]: Shutting down service sddm…done
Sep 26 19:27:41 hms-agserver64 systemd[1]: Stopped X Display Manager.
My first suggestion would be to disable auto-login. To do that, edit the file “/etc/sysconfig/displaymanager” (as root), and change that “appgen” to just “”.
When you then reboot, you should now get a graphic login screen. That’s provided by SDDM, your display manager.
If you instead still get a black screen, then that tells us something about where things are going wrong. My best guess is that you will get a login screen.
Near the bottom left corner of the login screen, there is a menu. On that menu, you can select which desktop you wish to use. The choices depend on what software you have installed. One of the choices should be “Icewm” (or maybe it says “Icewm session”. It is a very simple desktop, and should work. Maybe try that as a test.
The other choices should include “Plasma” and “Plasma (Wayland)” or something similar. Before you do anything, make a note of the selected session (before you change it). That will be useful to know.
I’m guessing (and this is a wild guess), that you were set to use “Plasma (Wayland)”. The reason that I am guessing this, is that Plasma (Wayland) has a particularly large cursor arrow. And you mentioned that as a symptom. Some graphic hardware might have problems with Wayland graphics. So try just the plain “Plasma” (or it might say “Plasma (X11)” or similar). That’s more likely to work than the Wayland version.
FBDEV indicates running in what amounts to rescue mode. Modesetting should be where fbdev is. Report back the output of:
grep 'Kernel command' /var/log/Xorg.0.log
I suspect the output will contain the string ‘nomodeset’. If true, it needs to be removed. You can test its removal by striking the E key at the grub menu and deleting it before proceeding to boot.
You are correct in that nomodeset was in the boot stream. I removed it on this boot with no apparant changes. Boot still stops with simple mouse cursor on page. Command output from current boot is this:
Please repeat the boot process by also appending to cmdline
plymouth.enable=0
Also upload the resulting /var/log/Xorg.0.log to http://susepaste.org, either via a web browser, or using the susepaste command. Finally, add output from
rpm -qa | grep dm
You can make the boot process more informative if when editing Grub you also remove splash=silent and quiet. FWIW, showopts does absolutely nothing unless using Grub Legacy and GFXboot. Finish by again once booted doing
inxi -Gxx
preferably logged into an X session in Konsole or an Xterm if available.
Did it again boot to a black screen with a large mouse cursor?
That list of installed packages seems to be saying you are not using 15.0, more likely 42.3, possibly older. inxi reports you are using 42.3’s X server.
It still booted to the black screen with mouse cursor.
The server is running Leap 42.
The other server that was cloned from this one and ‘updated’ to Leap 15 works just fine and boots into the normal log-in screen. That is without any other changes. Before the update the clone worked just like the existing server.
