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GDM Acting Up


raymac46

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After I updated my Thinkpad's Debian Stretch install, something went weird with the Gnome Display Manager I use to log in. After launch, the login screen would not show up - just a black screen. I could press Ctrl-Alt-F1 a couple of times and maybe the screen would appear. Or I could Ctrl-Alt-F2, get TTY2, log in and StartX to get the GNOME GUI.

I tried reinstalling and reconfiguring gdm3, gnome-session, xorg, and xserver-xorg without result. Finally, I gave up and just installed LightDM - which I use in Arch and like better anyway. That works fine - boot, get the login screen, start GUI.

I still don't know what's wrong with Gnome Display Manager but I don't want to reinstall Debian. Maybe I'll go with Ubuntu MATE if I have any more trouble.

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saturnian

Wow, I haven't seen this problem come up here (yet), and I have Stretch w/ GNOME on two machines, both using gdm3. Thanks for the info, sunrat.

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Haven't dealt with entropy since my days studying thermodynamics, but sunrat's suggestion fixed the problem. :clap:

I still think I'll stay with LightDM though.

That is the reason I stick around here - somebody always knows a solution to my Linux problem. :teehee:

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I read another article that said if you have a more recent Intel or AMD cpu that supports a hardware random number generator you can install rng-tools with its associated daemon rngd instead of haveged.

According to cpuinfo my Ivy Bridge mobile processor has this capability as it shows the rdrand flag. However, the O/S can't detect this so systemd will not start rngd.service :'( .

No matter - haveged works just fine and has fixed the issue. :bounce:

After going through all this my own personal entropy had increased significantly. :w00tx100:

Edited by raymac46
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There was a Stretch kernel update yesterday which may have addressed this problem. I can't confirm as I don't use GDM.

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Finally, I gave up and just installed LightDM - which I use in Arch and like better anyway.

 

Thank you for this comment. After thinking about it -- and, even though I didn't encounter the GDM bug here -- I switched from gdm3 to lightdm in one of my Stretch installations. I simply ran the following

 

$ sudo apt install lightdm lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings

 

Then I just followed the prompts. The lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings package provides the GUI, I guess, which is nice for configuring LightDM to taste.

 

Switching to LightDM actually solved a couple of other GDM-related annoyances in that installation.

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Yes the GUI makes it very easy to set up LightDM - even choosing your own background is easy. With GDM it's a bear to get rid of the battleship gray background.

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