Arch Linux

mypetbirdrules

Member

Registered: 2015-10-04

Posts: 15

GDM and Gnome fail to start on cloned installation from other laptop

Recently, I moved the Arch Linux installation from my old Acer laptop to a Thinkpad x230t. When I copied the partitions over, I ran genfstab and pacstrap from the live disk to set up the drive for the new computer. It boots up perfectly but the display manager refuses to start outright. I normally use GDM, but I also tried LightDM. Neither work on Wayland or X11. I made sure to install all the needed graphics drivers and I set up the Intel i915 driver to load on boot. I even blacklisted the radeon and nvidia kernel modules on boot.

When the laptop boots, it flashes the systemd-boot text on the screen but stops before it's finished. Looking in journalctl -u gdm, I found that GDM repeatedly spawned processes and killed them after 0.2 seconds nearly a hundred times, which explains the flickering I get. At the end of the log, however, are these two lines.

Could not start command '/usr/lib/gdm/gdm-session-worker': Too many open files
GLib: g_child_watch_add_full: assertion 'pid > 0' failed

I should also mention that I have upgraded my software to the newest version with pacman -Syu and I re-installed the latest version of Gnome, Mutter, and GDM. I don't think it's a problem with Wayland though. Starting up weston from the tty gives me a working weston session through DRI.

Modeler

Member

From: United Kingdom

Registered: 2011-07-28

Posts: 70

Re: GDM and Gnome fail to start on cloned installation from other laptop

Might it be worth trying a clean install of Arch on the new laptop, just to establish whether or not the issue is related to cloning (which I doubt)? You could even use a USB stick rather than the internal drive, assuming you can still do this if the laptop requires UEFI boot. This might save you a few headaches.

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Wirth's law: "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster"