Failed to start SDDM on Boot

Support
1

Today after installing 51 updates my system halts the boot process with the message “Failed to start SDDM”. These updates happened after briefly switching from branche stable to unstable (to update Ardour only). After switching back to stable pamac offered the 51 updates, which I probably should have ignored(?).

Anyway, I can ctrl-sh-F2 to Terminal and check sddm status or start up via ‘systemctl start sddm.service’. This fails:

× sddm.service - Simple Desktop Display Manager
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/sddm.service; enabled; preset: disabled)
     Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Wed 2022-11-09 20:35:26 CET; 6min ago
   Duration: 1ms
       Docs: man:sddm(1)
             man:sddm.conf(5)
    Process: 1124 ExecStart=/usr/bin/sddm (code=exited, status=127)
   Main PID: 1124 (code=exited, status=127)
        CPU: 1ms

nov 09 20:35:26 manja systemd[1]: sddm.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 2.
nov 09 20:35:26 manja systemd[1]: Stopped Simple Desktop Display Manager.
nov 09 20:35:26 manja systemd[1]: sddm.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
nov 09 20:35:26 manja systemd[1]: sddm.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
nov 09 20:35:26 manja systemd[1]: Failed to start Simple Desktop Display Manager.
nov 09 20:35:43 manja systemd[1]: sddm.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
nov 09 20:35:43 manja systemd[1]: sddm.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
nov 09 20:35:43 manja systemd[1]: Failed to start Simple Desktop Display Manager.

and

nov 09 20:34:50 manja systemd[1]: Started Simple Desktop Display Manager.
░░ Subject: A start job for unit sddm.service has finished successfully
░░ Defined-By: systemd
░░ Support: https://forum.manjaro.org/c/support
░░ 
░░ A start job for unit sddm.service has finished successfully.
░░ 
░░ The job identifier is 132.
nov 09 20:34:50 manja sddm[523]: /usr/bin/sddm: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.1.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
nov 09 20:34:50 manja systemd[1]: sddm.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=127/n/a
░░ Subject: Unit process exited
░░ Defined-By: systemd
░░ Support: https://forum.manjaro.org/c/support
<cut>
░░ A start job for unit sddm.service has finished with a failure.
░░ 
░░ The job identifier is 2346 and the job result is failed.

kernel is 5.15.77.2 which may be the kernel from the unstable branch.

I tried to use Timeshift to roll back to just before the fatal updates. That stops with an error that

rsync error while loading shared libraries: libcrypto.so.1.1 cannot open shared object filed: no such file or directory

I really could use some help!

2

I advise you to first fully synchronize either with the stable or the unstable branch.

sudo pacman -Syyuu
3

Thanks, that got the system back to stable. Booting is back to normal. Now pamac again shows 50 available updates. So now I have to find out why pamac is doing that. 1 of the updates is systemd 251.7-1 to 252-1 which is not part of stable yet…

4

Telling pamac to update its database should do the trick.

5

Use that and properly “downgrade” to stable:

$ sudo pacman -Syyuu
6

Yep, thanks again!

7

This topic was automatically closed 2 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.