raymac46 Posted May 7, 2018 Share Posted May 7, 2018 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted May 8, 2018 Share Posted May 8, 2018 Does this help? apt install haveged Something to do with random blah blah entropy generator. :'( http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=137404&start=30 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
saturnian Posted May 8, 2018 Share Posted May 8, 2018 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted May 8, 2018 Author Share Posted May 8, 2018 Haven't dealt with entropy since my days studying thermodynamics, but sunrat's suggestion fixed the problem. 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted May 8, 2018 Share Posted May 8, 2018 Nice Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted May 9, 2018 Author Share Posted May 9, 2018 (edited) 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. After going through all this my own personal entropy had increased significantly. Edited May 9, 2018 by raymac46 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted May 9, 2018 Share Posted May 9, 2018 There was a Stretch kernel update yesterday which may have addressed this problem. I can't confirm as I don't use GDM. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
saturnian Posted May 14, 2018 Share Posted May 14, 2018 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. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted May 14, 2018 Author Share Posted May 14, 2018 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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