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Re: systemctl restart sddm

On 7/22/18 7:15 PM, inkbottle wrote:

On Monday, July 23, 2018 12:14:05 AM CEST Bob Weber wrote:

On 7/22/18 5:42 PM, inkbottle wrote:

As some of you already know, since *completely uneventful* upgrade of
Friday, July 20, 2018, "sddm" does not start automatically anymore,
whether because something goes wrong at some point or because it doesn't
start at all, meaning it is not even invoked in the first place, that I
know not ;)

Anyway, I'm not so unfortunate, because "startx", invoked as simple user
in a "tty" is working fine, and it is my workaround for the present, and
will be until I can find enough time to deal with it properly, and not
simply trying to worsen the situation.

So, in my to-do list, first thing is: why should "sddm" start, at all, at
boot time?

Chris

Try backing the kernel down to 4.16 or earlier (or just pick an earlier
kernel at boot).  I have several VMs I use just to test the updates that
don't start up sddm unless I start a tty login (not startx) process.  The
offending kernel is currently 4.17.8-1.

Wow, I'm impressed. I've thought about that, but since I've seen no complain,
beside mine, I discarded that eventuality. "Well, what do you know!"

What tty login process are you referring to, specifically? What command did
you type? Plain user or "su"?

I've tried "systemctl restart sddm" as "su", with mixed results (not sure if
it went wrong or right; one time the machine had to be turned off using power
button, though, so I'm a bit chicken now): but that might not be what you
yourself did.

Thanks.
Like I said this is from a VM run under kvm/qemu and Virtual Machine Manager (VMM).  The VM is run in a graphical window and displays just as if it was connected to a monitor.  Since key sequences like Ctrl-Alt-F? and Ctrl-Alt-Delete would just work on my host desktop (KDE) VMM has options for sending these keys to a running VM.  So I can log in to tty1 by sending Ctrl-Alt-F1 which gives me a text login prompt.  Sending Ctrl-Alt-F7 would switch to the X graphical window if it is running.  So by logging into tty1 and switching to Ctrl-Alt-F7 and back to Ctrl-Alt-F1 seems to "kick" sddm into running ... in reality its probably just finally starting X.  In your case you would just use the keystrokes Ctrl-Alt-F? to switch between ttys.  Since this works by trial and error going back and forth between tty1 and tty7 I tried backing down to 4.16 kernel and all is well.  My host machine (my KDE desktop with 2, 27 inch monitors) is at 4.15 since a while ago I had problems with 4.16 there.  Also I have had problems with upgrades in X and mesa on my desktop.  Since some of these errors don't show up in the VMs I use to test upgrades I always use rsnapshot to take a snapshot of my desktop machine root (excluding /home) before I upgrade it since I depend on it to just work but I like to have the latest upgrades also.
So just try an older kernel and see if that helps.  You can find older kernels at http://snapshot.debian.org/. ; Just download 4.15 (around April 21) and install it with "dpkg -i linux-image-4.15.0-3-amd64_4.15.17-1_amd64.deb" as an example. Your kernel name may be different.  Example: 

The url

http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20180420T165136Z/pool/main/l/linux/linux-image-4.15.0-3-amd64-dbg_4.15.17-1_amd64.deb
Would download linux-image-4.15.0-3-amd64-dbg_4.15.17-1_amd64.deb and can be installed using the dpkg -i command.  I have these files stored locally using apt-cache-ng running on my router machine since I update 5 machines and 8 VMs and this way I only download the deb files once from the debian ftp servers. 

Remember you can always select the original kernel by using the grub boot menu.

...bob
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