Fresh installation on new HP laptop gets "Failed to start light display manager" error msg

Support Xfce
1

Hi guys.

After many years happily using Manjaro on an old Acer laptop, it was finally time to get a new laptop with a decent CPU.

I got a HP Laptop 15s-eq1023np with an AMD Ryzen 7 4700u CPU and an integrated Radeon RX Vega 7 integrated graphics GPU.

Manjaro (XFCE 20.2.1) installed super fast (only 2 minutes) but after reboot I got a blank screen with an error mensage:

“Failed to start light display manager”

After searching online, it seems that this error is somewhat common. The solution I found is to manually start lightdm every time the laptop boots.

  1. Opening the tty2 terminal by CTRL+ALT+F2

  2. Then type systemctl start lightdm

How can I solve this problem? Having to manually start the lightdm every time the computer boots up is very annoying.

Thanks!

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By the way, I just installed Linux Mint XFCE and everything works. Tested with kernel 5.4 and 5.10.

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Indeed. I’d recommend having a look at the logs (/var/log/Xorg.0.log appears to be the most important one, dmesg and journalctl -b might be useful to a lesser extent as well).

1 Like
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Thanks for the suggestion. Looking to the log helped me to find a definite solution.

The solution was already posted on this forum by @capsid

Basically I edited the /etc/mkinitcpio.conf file by adding amdgpu to MODULES.

MODULES="amdgpu"

Then I upgraded the kernel to 5.10 and rebooted. :smiley:

Super happy now that I can enjoy my new super fast computer. It was nice to try Linux Mint for a few hours, but the package manager of Manjaro is so much superior…

Thanks @DAC324 and @capsid

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