[WORKED AROUND] SDDM issue with Debian 9

[tastle]

I have a Dell Inspiron 710m. I just recently updated it from Debian Jessie to Stretch.

The problem that I'm having is that after the OS starts, I'll see a slight flicker on the display but everything is black. I can see my mouse cursor and if I move it around, the cursor will change as I'm assuming it is hovering over the login dialog that I cannot see.

If I drop to shell and log in, and manually run startx, everything seems okay. If I log out, I go back to shell.

During the upgrade process, I recall seeing a screen that asked if I should update from kdm to sddm, but I'm not sure if that has anything to do with this.

Does anyone know what I could have done wrong, or need to do?

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I just recently updated it from Debian Jessie to Stretch.

[...]

Does anyone know what I could have done wrong, or need to do?

Did you follow https://www.debian.org/releases/stretch ... ng.en.html?

Quite a lot can go wrong.

[tastle]

I followed the bits where I updated my sources and did the upgrade and cleanup. I didn't see any errors during the upgrade, and unfortunately I didn't record the upgrade. (Which might have been useful in a situation like this.) I did a lot of searching online but I didn't see anything relevant, or perhaps I wasn't using the correct keywords or terminology to get a decent hit.

At the same time, I upgraded another system and it doesn't have the "invisible login screen" problem.

It just seems so weird that the OS GUI works (KDE) after I log in and run startx, but (getting technical here... lol) "whatever" is launching the login GUI seems to launch it, but has display issues for everything but the mouse cursor.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

the OS GUI works (KDE) after I log in and run startx

What is your display manager?

Try:

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ls -l /etc/systemd/system/display-manager.service

I find GDM to be less buggy than sddm.

[tastle]

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lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 32 Jan 2 21:08 /etc/systemd/system/display-manager.service -> /lib/systemd/system/sddm.service

[bw123]

Couple ways you could go, did you try typing the password and hitting enter? or typing username, tab, pw, enter while it looks like the box has focus? If you get a desktop after that then it's sddm problem for sure.

I didn't do an upgrade, but I agree sddm has some issue. I replaced it with lightdm. You might try purge and reinstall it. Stop it before you do anything though, it's really picky.

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# systemctl stop display-manager.service

[tastle]

Having a hard time guessing my tabs to enter my username and password, but I don't seem to have any problem eventually tabbing to either shutdown or reboot. Still guessing the number of tabs required to log in since that is an interesting test. I can't seem to make the cursor find the fields to try to put focus on them.

[tastle]

So is the recommendation to re-install something? SDDM? Or should I look at something else?

Thanks to everyone for the help so far!

[bw123]

make sure you have these pkgs installed
sddm-theme-breeze
kde-config-sddm
go into the system settings using the working startx and set the theme there?

[tastle]

Both packages are installed.

However, I noticed something odd when going to the system settings. When I select "Login Screen (SDDM)", the right hand panel doesn't change from the default "Autostart" view. Also, under "Workspace Theme", the same thing happens when I select "Look And Feel", "Desktop Theme" or "Splash Screen". "Cursor Theme" loads fine.

[tastle]

So do you think I should re-install sddm, or just switch to a different desktop manager?

[tastle]

I just gave up on sddm and installed lightdm, and that worked around the problem.

It's a shame that sddm is so buggy. I only got it to work on one of three boxes now. This past weekend I moved an Inspiron 531 from Windows 10 Home to Debian 9 because it couldn't apply the latest greenfield auto update, causing a lot of reboot grief. It appears sddm isn't much better.