SDDM fails to start Xorg server and keeps returning to login screen

Hello, I just tried installing qtile via pacman

sudo pacman -Sy qtile

and after restarting my laptop, SDDM fails to launch plasma or qtile. After selecting which desktop to launch and entering the password, The screen goes black, I get the usual clean blocks message, and then the SDDM reapears.

TTY still works and starting the XServer via startx works as does qtile with qtile start -b wayland after installing the necessary packages for qtile to work with wayland.

I did quite a lot of research, but couldn’t find anything which matched my problem, at least nothing that managed to solve my problem.

Also I should mention that removing qtile with sudo pacman -R qtile does not fix the issue, and both frontends start without any error messages that I can see.

This is my first forum post, so I hope I did everything correctly, If not, I’ll gladly modify it and adapt it to any format guidlines, etc.

Thanks~

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Could be a partial update, you either just install

$ sudo pacman -S qtile

or update at the same time

$ sudo pacman -Syu qtile

Never sync without updating.

Check your journal for errors:

$ journalctl -b -p err

Fully update your system:

$ sudo pacman -Syu
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Thanks for the quick reply,
I had done a system upgrade using sudo pacman -Syu just before, so I don’t think that caused any problems. Just to be sure, I cleanly removed qtile and reinstalled it with just pacman -S as you suggested, but I still am getting the same error as before.

Scanning the journalctl didn’t yield a lot either, sorry for pasting the entire error log, but here are the log contents, if you want to take a look. justpaste.it/1xdrt

Thanks again :slight_smile:

@aikow Try that… it won’t be long, and it would show the errors only

Have you tried

journalctl --unit=sddm.service

or looked at

cat /var/log/Xorg.?.log

Thanks for the quick and friendly replies.

journalctl --unit=sddm.service yields the following error message

Error from greeter session: "Process crashed"
Auth: sddm-helper  crashed (exit code 15)

Adding the boot flag to the other journalctl command showed a couple of ACPI BIOS Error (bug): Failure creating named object ..., AE_ALREADY_EXISTS errors as well as a couple of other error message

-- Journal begins at Sun 2021-10-31 15:23:32 CET, ends at Sun 2021-11-07 18:13:30 CET. --
Nov 07 17:40:46 alethkar kernel: ACPI BIOS Error (bug): Failure creating named object [\_SB.PCI0.SAT0.PRT0], AE_ALREADY_EXISTS (20190816/dswload2-326)
Nov 07 17:40:46 alethkar kernel: ACPI Error: AE_ALREADY_EXISTS, During name lookup/catalog (20190816/psobject-220)
Nov 07 17:40:46 alethkar kernel: ACPI BIOS Error (bug): Failure creating named object [\_SB.PCI0.SAT0.PRT1], AE_ALREADY_EXISTS (20190816/dswload2-326)
Nov 07 17:40:46 alethkar kernel: ACPI Error: AE_ALREADY_EXISTS, During name lookup/catalog (20190816/psobject-220)
Nov 07 17:40:46 alethkar kernel: ACPI BIOS Error (bug): Failure creating named object [\_SB.PCI0.SAT0.PRT3], AE_ALREADY_EXISTS (20190816/dswload2-326)
Nov 07 17:40:46 alethkar kernel: ACPI Error: AE_ALREADY_EXISTS, During name lookup/catalog (20190816/psobject-220)
Nov 07 17:40:46 alethkar kernel: ACPI BIOS Error (bug): Failure creating named object [\_SB.PCI0.SAT0.PRT4], AE_ALREADY_EXISTS (20190816/dswload2-326)
Nov 07 17:40:46 alethkar kernel: ACPI Error: AE_ALREADY_EXISTS, During name lookup/catalog (20190816/psobject-220)
Nov 07 17:40:46 alethkar kernel: ACPI BIOS Error (bug): Failure creating named object [\_SB.PCI0.SAT0.PRT5], AE_ALREADY_EXISTS (20190816/dswload2-326)
Nov 07 17:40:46 alethkar kernel: ACPI Error: AE_ALREADY_EXISTS, During name lookup/catalog (20190816/psobject-220)
Nov 07 17:40:46 alethkar kernel: cgroup2: Unknown parameter 'memory_recursiveprot'
Nov 07 17:40:47 alethkar kernel: tpm_crb MSFT0101:00: [Firmware Bug]: ACPI region does not cover the entire command/response buffer. [mem 0xfed40000-0xfed4087f flags 0x200] vs fed40080 f80
Nov 07 17:40:47 alethkar kernel: tpm_crb MSFT0101:00: [Firmware Bug]: ACPI region does not cover the entire command/response buffer. [mem 0xfed40000-0xfed4087f flags 0x200] vs fed40080 f80
Nov 07 17:40:47 alethkar kernel: proc: Bad value for 'hidepid'
Nov 07 17:40:47 alethkar kernel: proc: Bad value for 'hidepid'
Nov 07 17:40:48 alethkar bluetoothd[945]: src/adapter.c:reset_adv_monitors_complete() Failed to reset Adv Monitors: Unknown Command (0x01)
Nov 07 18:02:27 alethkar kernel: Bluetooth: hci0: unexpected event for opcode 0xfc2f
Nov 07 18:02:27 alethkar bluetoothd[945]: src/adapter.c:reset_adv_monitors_complete() Failed to reset Adv Monitors: Unknown Command (0x01)

I tried logging in via SDDM at around 17:40.

You could use

coredumpctl list

to list he created coredump. Use

coredumpctl debug <PID>

to get more information on why it crashed. Not sure how helpful this will be, given that Manjaro unfortunately doesn’t ship with debugging info included. :frowning:
Did the /var/log/Xorg.0.lof file not contain any info?
Can you check if sddm.config was changed during the while/after installing qtile?
Can you create a new user and l try to log into this new user?
Do you have a backup, to compare what changed?

I’m on Arch and I’m getting a similar error with sddm and qtile.
Sddm seems to work fine with awesome and spectrwm.
At the top of cat ~/.local/share/sddm/xorg-session.log it says:

/usr/share/sddm/scripts/Xsession:104: command not found: qtile start

My guess is that there is some issue with qtile using the command-line argument “start” since awesome and spectrwm don’t use any command-line arguments and they work fine.