changing to graphical login on current kdm is missing
 

Hi All, I have come accross a problem in that normally to enable graphical boot/login I just change the id entry in inittab from 3 to 4
Trying it with current didn't work for me.
I checked the rc.4 script to see what should be happening.
sddm doesn't appear to work on my test machine, and kdm is missing entirely.

startx from text login works fine.
what happened to the kde login manager? I can't find it when greping /var/lib/pkgtool/packages/*

The Plasma5 uses SDDM as login manager.

Unfortunately sddm doesn't appear to work on my test pc. when in runlevel 4 it does nothing, and you are dropped to a regular text login

Attempting to run it from a run level3 login and it does nothing, it just sits with the text there, until i press ctrl-C to get back to a text prompt.

I verified that startx and startkwayland work on their own from run level 3.

SDDM should run as root to do its job. You can change to runlevel 4 on /etc/inittab

If everything else, then you hit a bug on SDDM. You can look on its log to see what it does not like: /var/log/sddm.log

hmmm. When I log in as root in init 3 sddm appears to hang when I try to run it.
looking at /var/log/sddm I see
then after waiting for a minute and nothing happens, I ctrl-c to get to a prompt, and
is added to the log

it doesn't actually appear to do anything. I tried manually switching (ctrl-alt-Fx) between the 4 text vts and 7 (normally the graphics one, but there is nothing on the graphics one).

I do have a radeon.modeset=0 on my kernel line (otherwise I can't see anything part-way through the kernel boot), but as both x and wayland start manually ok, that shouldn't effect things.

I tried running sddm in test mode, and it endlessly goes in a loop filling up the log. I can provide the repeating part if it would help

In the past I had some problems with sddm on Ubuntu with sddm not lauching and freezing some times. And from time to time it was working...

So in the current Slackware I don't use it on that laptop. I use gdm or kdm (I have a recompiled sbo like version).

I have also an arm version of the current Slackware on a Raspberry PI4 and I use gdm because SDDM seems to have the same stability problems (but with very different hardware).

gdm is easy to install. It has few dependencies.

Maybe an explanation for the problem :
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1912046

Slackware has now elogind which maybe have the same sort of problem as systemd for SDDM because it is an extract of systemd. It is not directly the fault of systemd but some variables given to it are not POSIX so they are filtered.

Thanks BrunoLafleur, I had a look at that, and checked env, but there wasn't a single environment variable with non standard characters
(A-Z,1-9,_ ) so it doesn't look like that is the cause.

Is this some sort of minimalist install? instead of the Full Recommended Install? The only issue I have ever seen with SDDM is that /etc/sddm.conf contains the line

which, for a time, did not auto switch VTs for me resulting in a blank VT1 and requiring a manual "Alt-F7" to get to X. These days it works fine with no manual intervention.

The problems reported for SDDM seems to be very random. They don't seem to depends on graphical cards nor with the kernel or are common to at least some of them on different architecture.

For me I have only full current Slackware. But problems appears with very different arch and distributions.

And also env variables maybe set inside components of the system and maybe not visible in the console environnement of the user.

Also PAM is setting some env variables in particular for desktop managers like SDDM, KDM or GDM. In the Slackware current they seem to be correctly set.

in my case the install is a full install of current. I have tried manually switching to vt7 but there is nothing on that page.
I haven't got round to trying it on some different hardware, but I can rig up a barebones and try it out to see if it affects more than one bit of hardware for me. The hardware giving me the problem is a 27" imac which reports an RV770/M98L ati graphics with lspci, although as previously noted I do have radeon.nomodeset=0 as a kernel option so that I can see stuff, (and I did install the x86-video-fbdev from extra). The fact I can run x or wayland manually seems to point to an sddm issue.

I should comment that on the problem computer, which although it is set to boot to runlevel 4, appears to be in runlevel 3, ie no graphical login,
sddm and sddm.bin appear to be running (ps -A shows them) even though there is no graphical display started.

There is also a lot of SDDM problems due to generating random data at boot.

And also SDDM launching before video drivers.

I don't know if those are pertinent with Slackware current.

Are you using generic or full kernel ?

I am using huge kernel (5.13.4), everything up to date as of today