I can't log in after installing lightdm (SOLVED)

Hello everyone.
Can you help me?
I installed lightdm and when I type the password nothing changes and I can’t log in.
(Manjaro XFCE is installed in VirtualBox).

Hi there. Maybe you have to enable lightdm first. Have a look here:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/LightDM#Enabling_LightDM

Manjaro Xfce does come with lightdm as display manager installed and active already - so you did not have to install it.

The issue seems to be that you can’t log in through it.
Perhaps describe the symptoms more clearly.

Can you switch to a TTY (CTRL+ALT+F2 for example)
and log in there?

As @Nachlese pointed, lightdm is already the login manager for the Xfce edition. So you either installed something else (what?), or you didn’t used the recent Manjaro ISO (from where?).

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I can switch.

I customized my workspace as mac os.

I watched this YouTube video.

youtu.be/oQ8RWtD3MTQ?t=1033

Sorry, I don’t why, but i can’t include imags or links. ( Sorry, you can’t embed media items in a post. )

no pictures necessary - and the fact that you can’t post pictures is a spam protection measure
find a service to upload to and post the link here … like you did to that video

was a key part of my question
don’t be stingy with your words and description
you probably can, but you didn’t say …


As per your linked video, you installed a different greeter.

Undo what you changed to use that - so you can at least log in.

Then you can work on figuring out how to achieve your desired look - perhaps the webkit-greeter is not even necessary to do that.
It might be this program - or the theme used by it - which is causing your issue.
The video is two years old and things have changed …

Yes, I can log in.
I don’t know how to use terminal.
How I could delete the program?

You will probably have to learn a little bit to do just that.
Because if you can’t get to you graphical session - because you can’t log in via the misconfigured display manager - you’ll have to rectify the situation in the TTY.

I will know more about that once I know what you did to get where you are now.
And since that probably means watching the video, or at least skipping through it, this will take some time.
… the watching of it as well as finding the time to do so
so: don’t hold your breath for the next few hours :sunglasses:

You could, in preparation for easier work in the TTY, install a terminal file manager.
It may look ancient but it will be easy to understand and use and will definitely help you finding your way around without a graphical session
instead of having just the command line to work with.

sudo pacman -S mc

once installed, just type “mc” and enter to start it…

You probably had to edit a few files to configure your now defunct display manager.
Using this terminal file manager, you can do just that same thing to revert the changes.

… that is what we will be doing, most likely

In the meantime, get a bit familiar with mc.

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:blush: Thank you so much for your support and help. I will do as you wrote

From what I saw so far, it should actually be easy to get you back to the original greeter so that you can log in again:

start optional content (skip the next few lines if you want):


mc is not needed - but you can use it.
But: you have to run it as root
in order to edit in the /etc directory, where the file you need to edit is

sudo mc

in that case …

But be careful (not scared, just very careful) - because there is no “undo”, no recycle bin …

The even easier way is to use nano (an editor).

first (I almost always do that)
sudo cp -a /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.backup.today
(so that you have a copy of the “original” file, in case the edit with the unfamiliar editor goes south …)

/end optional content


then:

sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

find the line that was modified to use the new greeter

greeter-session=lightdm-webkit2-greeter
and change it back to what it was:
greeter-session=lightdm-gtk-greeter

save the file
quit the editor

then either reboot
or restart lightdm:
systemctl restart lightdm.service

that should do it.

btw:
I just confirmed that the
lightdm-webkit2-greeter
does indeed not work
not “just like that” anyway

cannot log in when using that

installing
lightdm-slick-greeter
and configuring that one and using the same background images that the video used
will likely give very similar visual results

and it will work :wink:


He (the video creator) did both a nice and terrible job with his video.
the result looks great - but it is very hard and tedious to follow
especially when you do not really know what he is doing and why
and what certain actions are supposed to achieve.

No matter where i search,

…i had a discussion some time ago, but ppl insist on this outdated, abandoned fuzz they just see for 5 seconds. I don’t get it.

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… there is no way for him (OP) to know that - he just finds a visually appealing video and wants to recreate the look

but the greeter lightdm-webkit2-greeter being in the repos but not working is an issue

50/50 , the video is two years old.

that is also something that newbees tend to not be aware of
who suspects a repo package to be dysfunctional?

It’s no big deal for me (for example).
It took me about a minute to see that it didn’t work
and instantly revert.

new users … it’s different :wink:

Let’s not clutter the thread - he’s got a problem to solve. :wink:

Imho lightdm is dead. It doesn’t work properly with xfce (as mentioned here). The last change happened 3 years ago, I don’t quite understand why this otherwise outstanding distro delivers it.

What? → Release 1.32.0 · canonical/lightdm · GitHub

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