Re: debian sid no boot after this morning's update
On Thu, Jan 05, 2023 at 09:12:58AM -0500, Frank wrote:
> On 2023-01-04 11:23 p.m., Greg Wooledge wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 04, 2023 at 11:03:15PM -0500, Frank wrote:
> > > ** (process:734): WARNING **: 22:32:38.355: Error reading existing
> > > Xauthority: Failed to open file ?/var/lib/lightdm/.Xauthority?: Permission
> > > denied
> > > Error writing X authority: Failed to open X authority
> > > /var/lib/lightdm/.Xauthority: Permission denied
> > Does that file exist? If so, ls -ld /var/lib/lightdm/.Xauthority
> >
> > If not, ls -ld /var/lib/lightdm
> >
> > Hell, just do both regardless of whether the file currently exists.
> > It's one command with two lines of output. Should be the first thing
> > you do.
>
> Yes, the file exists and is owned by lightdm. I don't know whether this is
> correct as I can't find any info on who should own it.
> I tried moving it out of the way hoping lightdm or the greeter would
> recreate but no luck.
Hmm, that's weird indeed. If the file is owned by lightdm (the user),
that implies that lightdm (the program) was able to write it in the past.
If it can't do so now, then we have to try to guess what changed which
could lead to this result.
Possibility 1: lightdm (the program) no longer runs as lightdm (the user).
Pissibility 2: a new restriction has been added to the service which
launches lightdm (the program). Something at the AppArmor level, or at
the systemd unit level, perhaps.
> It is strange as there were no updates yesterday of lightdm or the greeter.
How about in recent days? Maybe a change occurred a few days ago, but
you hadn't rebooted, so the changes didn't actually have any impact yet.
> The GTK
> greeter was updated the day before but Debian started and ran fine after
> that.
I don't know what this is. A separate package?
> There are other strange things going on which may or not be related. I tried
> to
> reinstall lightdm and the greeter using apt. (The Debian partition is
> mounted
> on my Fedora partition)
This is confusing. Are you saying that you have a multi-boot system,
with both Debian and Fedora installed on the same hard drive? And that
you booted into Fedora, then mounted the Debian root file system somewhere,
and then chrooted into it?
> but apt failed saying it could not contact
> debian.deb to
> gain access to the needed files. I downloaded the files from Fedora and
> moved them
> to Debian but dpkg said it could not access them !!??
Details would be helpful here. Actual commands, actual error messages.
> Is there a way to reinstall lightdm and the greeter from Fedora ?? Perhaps
> using chroot
> which I have zero knowledge of.
Wait... you DID NOT chroot into the Debian file system after mounting it?!
How in the hell did you expect ANYTHING to work...?
OK, basic primer:
mkdir /debian
mount /dev/whatever /debian
chroot /debian
There's fancy crap you can do involving bind mounts of /proc and so on,
but you probably don't need all that.
That said, I think you've jumped ahead too far. Your Debian system
apparently boots just fine -- it just doesn't run X. So boot Debian,
either normally, or with the "systemd.unit=multi-user.target" kernel
parameter, login on a regular text console, and fix it from there.
Another thing you could try would be to boot your previous kernel, in
case it was a kernel update that broke lightdm. It might not make any
difference, but hey, it's worth trying.
Another other thing you could try would be to run 'startx' from a
regular text console after booting Debian and logging in on said console.
If X starts correctly that way, then you know the problem is truly in
the DM, not in X, video drivers, video firmware, etc. We suspect this
already, but confirmation is always good.
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