Buildiso creates unusable ISOs after latest update

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1

Last week, I built a KDE plasma ISO using $ buildiso -p kde -k linux618
Today, after updating my system using # pacman -Syu and clearing the contents of /var/lib/manjaro-tools/buildiso/ , I ran the same aforementioned command once more, only the time to be greeted with the following upon booting the iso file, and I quote: “_”

That’s it an unblinking still unserscore. TTYs still worked, couldn’t start xorg.

I have not modified any files in the default kde profile.

It worked perfectly before all the packages in the repos were updated.

2

How?

  • bare metal?
    • machine type?
  • virtual machine?
    • virtual box?
    • libvirt?
  • USB?
    • ventoy?
    • direct write?
3

dell latitude 3500 laptop.
I am booting from a kingston 128gb usb to bare metal, tried both dd and ventoy, same result

I am currently at work, and will post more details if you’d like once I get home

Edit: it’s an an intel core i5 (I just remembered that)

4

I have been doing some tests

  • KDE ISO with Linux 6.18 (minimal profile)
  • KDE ISO with Linux 7.0 (minimal profile)

Test systems

The devices I have tested are all fully functional and fully up-to-date devices running Manjaro Linux with either 6.18 or 7.0 kernel.

Lenovo Legion Intel i7-13650HX Intel Iris Xe & Nvidia 5070

Linux 6.18

  • Using free driver: ISO hung on entering graphics mode on all branches
  • Using proprietary driver: ISO load to desktop

Lenovo Thinkpad T495 AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 3500U w/ Radeon Vega Mobile gfx

Linux 6.18

  • no issues

Tuxedo Infiniti Book Pro 14 Gen8 Intel i7-13700H Iris Xe

Linux 6.18

  • ISO hung on entering graphics mode on all branches

Clevo N141WU Intel i7-8550 UDH Graphics 620

Linux 6.18

  • no issues

Lenovo Thinkpad X13 gen.4 AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U w/ Radeon 780M gfx

Linux 6.18

  • ISO hung on entering graphics mode on all branches

Linux 7.0

  • ISO hung on entering graphics mode

Initial results

@philm As our foremost expert - any thoughts on this?

I am uncertain and a little confused as to where the could orgininate.

This could point to an issue with manjaro-tools scripts - but where?

I have tested using a Ventoy disk - so there is that.

  • tested using default mode
  • tested using grub mode

The reason for testing both modes is that Ventoy has quirks where sometimes on mode work and the other does not - sometimes the opposite work.

I have also tested using qemu/libvirt and the ISO fail to load the desktop.

2 Likes
9

Plymouth issue ?!?

10

I thought of that - but I can’t see why this wouldn’t affect already running installations.

11

No, it doesn’t seem to be that, I’m affraid. I have right now just built an iso using the default kde plasma profile, only after going into Packages-Desktop and removing plymouth, plymouth-theme-manjaro, and plymouth-kcm

The issue still persists. Any sort of temporary solution is more than welcome.

12

Before booting remove quiet and splash from the grub entry by pressing E when selected. CTRL + X to start after. Adding 3 will force a TTY.

13

If I force TTY mode on booting, I get to functional console.

Sign on as root with passwd manjaro and manually starting sddm will result in a deadlock with a black screen.

systemctl start sddm

If switching to another TTY - the login screen will appear but entering a password will fail - resulting in yet another black screen.

Switching to yet another TTY - sign on as manjaro (or root) - and starting plasma manually work

startplasma-wayland

If I switch the profile to use plasma login manager the issue goes away.

git diff --cached

diff --git a/manjaro/kde/Packages-Desktop b/manjaro/kde/Packages-Desktop
index 4e28e25a..082f4f4f 100644
--- a/manjaro/kde/Packages-Desktop
+++ b/manjaro/kde/Packages-Desktop
@@ -83,8 +83,9 @@ pamac-cli
 >extra python-pysmbc          # SMB browser support
 
 ## Display manager
-sddm
-sddm-kcm
+plasma-login-manager
+#sddm
+#sddm-kcm
 
 ## Plasma5
 audiocd-kio
diff --git a/manjaro/kde/live-overlay/etc/pam.d b/manjaro/kde/live-overlay/etc/pam.d
deleted file mode 120000
index 68de5965..00000000
--- a/manjaro/kde/live-overlay/etc/pam.d
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1 +0,0 @@
-../../../../shared/manjaro/live-overlay/etc/pam.d
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/manjaro/kde/live-overlay/etc/pam.d/kde b/manjaro/kde/live-overlay/etc/pam.d/kde
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..9bdb4d75
--- /dev/null
+++ b/manjaro/kde/live-overlay/etc/pam.d/kde
@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+#%PAM-1.0
+auth       sufficient   pam_succeed_if.so user ingroup wheel
+auth       include      system-login
+account    include      system-login
+session    include      system-login
+password   include      system-login
diff --git a/manjaro/kde/live-overlay/etc/pam.d/plasmalogin b/manjaro/kde/live-overlay/etc/pam.d/plasmalogin
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..9bdb4d75
--- /dev/null
+++ b/manjaro/kde/live-overlay/etc/pam.d/plasmalogin
@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+#%PAM-1.0
+auth       sufficient   pam_succeed_if.so user ingroup wheel
+auth       include      system-login
+account    include      system-login
+session    include      system-login
+password   include      system-login
diff --git a/manjaro/kde/live-overlay/etc/pam.d/su b/manjaro/kde/live-overlay/etc/pam.d/su
new file mode 120000
index 00000000..0937bc6e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/manjaro/kde/live-overlay/etc/pam.d/su
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+../../../../../shared/manjaro/live-overlay/etc/pam.d/su
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/manjaro/kde/live-overlay/etc/plasmalogin.conf.d/autologin.conf b/manjaro/kde/live-overlay/etc/plasmalogin.conf.d/autologin.conf
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..90bf4d80
--- /dev/null
+++ b/manjaro/kde/live-overlay/etc/plasmalogin.conf.d/autologin.conf
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+[Autologin]
+User=manjaro
+Session=plasma.desktop
diff --git a/manjaro/kde/profile.conf b/manjaro/kde/profile.conf
index f8640408..8a99cb12 100644
--- a/manjaro/kde/profile.conf
+++ b/manjaro/kde/profile.conf
@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@
 # use multilib packages; x86_64 only
 # multilib="true"
 
-displaymanager="sddm"
+displaymanager="plasmalogin"
 
 # Set to false to disable autologin in the livecd
 # autologin="true"

My experimental iso-profiles repo can be viewed at wonky/iso-profiles - Codeberg.org

Temporary test ISO (unstable branch) using plasma-login-manager (bobs.plasma) can be found at https://manjaro.dk/kde-test

Post Update KDE goes black after login attempt and locks up fully
14

Is that how you’ve chosen to force wayland? Breaking the normal way graphical sessions work and have worked since before linux? How pathetic.

For the record, I will not be able to test any suggestion for at least another seven hours

15

Manjaro is not forcing anything - I have no idea why it happens.

I am as puzzled by this as you are - I have simply tried to figure out how I could work around - I have simply provided my findings - no conclusions what-so-ever.

Manjaro is not breaking anything on purpose

please - keep you calm…

1 Like
16

Manjaro is not forcing anything or breaking anything. It was the decision of the desktop environment developers — KDE and GNOME, respectively — to drop X11 support in favor of Wayland, although Plasma does at least for now still support X11.

KDE will be dropping X11 completely with the release of Plasma 6.8, but GNOME has already been Wayland-only since 4.9.

1 Like
17

Alright, it’s not as if getting agitated will lead to anything, tho I do find this situation undeniably annoying.

I will get back to testing as soon as I can and will report my findings as well.

1 Like
18

A hypothetical: If the KDE Login Manager were the default, might that make a difference?

Nevermind, I should polish my glasses.

Making plasma-login-manager the default might be a positive step. For those still clinging to the plasma-x11-session; would it cause issues that couldn’t be worked around?

19

I just tried to launch a Plasma X11 session from plasma login manager - that is not possible.

I am guessing - but I am thinking that Plasma developers has changed something that makes it very difficult to run a session based on X11.

That would correlate with their intent to drop X11 completely - I don’t know.

Perhaps some heavy searching will help in our understanding of what is happening.

EDIT

Just speculation - I still don’t know head from tail in this - it is far above my pay grade - oh trash that - I don’t get paid - I am just a community member as You are.

Some searching indicates that Plasma 6.6.5 should be an improvement with relation to Nvidia - perhaps those improvements together with the fact that they moved to plasma-login-manager - has created unforeseen regressions when it comes to sddm

EDIT 2026-05-13T22:00:00Z
My speculation was off - very much off - it appears a change in sddm and how it applies theming has made the Manjaro breath theme unusable.

EDIT even that speculation is not valid - there has been no changes to theme or sddm - see below comment #32

3 Likes
22

I’m running into this exact same issue after updating my system on the testing branch. Been pulling my hair out for about 6 hours now trying to fix this. Moving back to Stable didn’t seem to fix it for me and switching to Plasma Login Manager from sddm just leads to a black screen with a cursor.

Can’t get back into TTY to get much information but I did notice a systemd journalctl line earlier indicating “plasma session transaction is destructive” because it had both a stop and a start command set on it. From my limited knowledge, it seemed as if the user session was getting started and then quickly stopped leading to QT core dumps.

I’ll try to get back into my system to try and retrieve some more useful information.

24

After some more thinking - to isolate what goes wrong -

  • commented the manjaro-kde-settings package
  • commented the sddm-breath-theme package
  • rebuild the iso
  • now the iso boot to desktop with sddm as display manager

So we need to look into the sddm-breath-theme and manjaro-kde-settings package

The changes I made to the kde profile Packages-Desktop file

  • line 123 comment - sddm-breath-theme
  • line 125 comment - breeze5
  • insert at 126 - breeze
  • line 223 comment - manjaro-kde-settings
  • line 224 comment - manjaro-browser-settings

A test ISO manjaro-kde-26.134-minimal-260514-linux618 can be downloaded from the location previously linked.

2 Likes
25

First of all I don’t get what the fuzz is all about. The Linux OS is like Lego bricks and most people have to learn on how to maintain it. There are many options and settings you can do. Even more drivers and stuff to get things going.

I’m doing Manjaro since more than 15 years now. The public Initial release was on 10 July 2011, 14 years ago. However I worked with friends one year prior to that on getting the basis done.

Tech changes and some hold on on legacy stuff. I’m also involved in another project on which we have ditched legacy stuff like Xorg, X11 and other things, fully concentrating on upcoming technology like rust and other things. Wayland focused only. So ya, the trend is going somewhere and is changing constantly.

Additionally with AI and other things going on a lot of new stuff is surfacing lately. See all the root LPE’s engineers just found the last couple of days.

With all the political stuff going on, also governments are looking for solutions and found FOSS software. Tax money now gets largely spent, for example on KDE stuff. So the Linux desktop gets shaped to be usable for workstations and offices as well. You as a user can still choose and might profit on the upcoming changes.

If we now talk about SDDM, the thing which is actually managing how Plasma gets started on Manjaro. SDDM (Simple Desktop Display Manager) is a modern, fast, and themeable graphical login program for X11 and Wayland, written in C++11 and utilizing QML for interface design. It is not part of the KDE eco-system and developed by a 3rd party. However, KDE developers are helping, since Valve is still using SDDM for their products, like the SteamDeck. On my end I tested SDDM to be working fine on Wayland.

Now there is Plasma-Login-Manager, which is replacing SDDM in future. It is Wayland focused for a reason. On Manjaro we didn’t switch to it yet, since our Calamares version has not yet support for it. I’ve added it now with https://gitlab.manjaro.org/applications/calamares/-/commit/2ad6abd on both 3.4.x-staging and development branches of our source and pushed packages to our unstable branch of our Manjaro package repository. Most likely our Github-CIs will pickup those changes in the upcoming days. Then you can test as needed.

Some might have noticed that I’m not much involved in Manjaro development lately and have very limited time to do so. I have no time for non-sense as maintaining a distro is very complex.

TL;DR

Manjaro will follow upstream changes and will adopt Wayland by default as we had already done with Plasma and GNOME editions. XFCE is currently also working to get Wayland going. Since they are a smaller team, it might take a couple of months more to complete, however they already released a preview version on things they had already accomplished.

So test on our Review ISOs and report issues there!

1 Like