[solved] gdm and gnome suddenly fail to start

Moo-Crumpus · 2015-01-22 18:14:04

Today, I was working on my laptop, fresh installed some days ago, working out some minor parts. I use to run gdm and gnome.

Things I did at last:

tried Plymouth, which worked but was kind of boring, and uninstalled it.
switched from radeon to catalyst, and tried some pxp_catalyst_switch things, but decided it is not worth any engagement. Installed catalyst without pxp, disabled switchable graphics inside the bios settings, removed all xorg.conf-files that have been created by the switch command, created a new one, testet, worked.
uninstalled acpid, and added resume=UUID=... to my kernel line in grub, because hibernation, suspend and resume crashed gnome/gdm. Suspending and resuming worked. I tried some times to close the laptop, and see how the machine would behave, and everything was fine.
Went away for an hour, came back, hit a key and gnome woke up. Well, somehow. The apps, having been started before, where still responding on mouse and keyboard events, but the gnome-shell and the windows environment where not. The top left corner of the gnome-shell gave graphical response by its circles showing up, but nothing else was showing any reaction.
Hardware reboot
The next boot, systemd was starting the jobs, giving [OK] feedbacks, but was hanging inside the console after [OK] graphical-target and something about accounts [OK], not starting gdm. The cursor was blinking and the harddisk was showing quite some activity.
I was in doubt if I had possible did bad things while trying out switchable graphics, so I did another hardware reboot and started system.d using the multi-user.target.

And here I am. Start X still works fine. But starting gdm fails, giving a black screen as response.
With .xinitrc -> exec gnome-session gnome shows up with its helpless Oops-Messages, even on brand new user accounts.
I tried lightdm. Lightdm works, but gnome still gives me 'Oops' messages. I uninstalled gdm, gnome, gnome-extra. Did a fresh install with pacman after -Scc.

Strange:
pacman -R gdm gives bad response like "Failed...". Reinstalling gdm gives bad response about /var/lib/gdm/ files, who don't seem to match. If I uninstall gdm, erase those files, and reinstall gdm, there are no error reports.

But the whole gnome thing is somehow stuck.

Time to try ... kde?

Last edited by Moo-Crumpus (2015-01-23 14:54:54)

Moo-Crumpus · 2015-01-23 14:59:24

I did a fresh install with minimalistic configurations, with the same result, and uninstalled catalyst.
gdm and gnome failed with radeon, too.
Using my (switchable) intel i915 graphic hardware gdm and gnome work.

Weird.

Arch Linux

#1 2015-01-22 18:14:04

[solved] gdm and gnome suddenly fail to start

#2 2015-01-23 14:59:24

Re: [solved] gdm and gnome suddenly fail to start

Board footer