EDIT: 2026-07-20T22:00:00Z
Remember, this topic was created 2026-07-09T22:00:00Z and only after a serious amount of local troubleshooting and building ISOs.
The statements made here were true for the local troubleshooting and ISOs.
The problem
It is a general issue with newer xfce builds, I am not sure what it is, but I am fairly certain it has something do with the configuration of lightdm.
- The Gnome edition uses GDM - no issues
- The KDE edition uses SDDM - no issues
- Custom Plasma ISO with plasma login manager - no issues
I have begun pick-axing the installation process in the hope that I find it.
I have a lot of thoughts - but no solutions.
The fact that you can boot the system or not - if not you can leave the system at the error message for a short period of time which makes it settle and you can login - makes me believe there is a race condition possibly with the the systemd logind.
I have found a script which which - according to the script - should fix a panel error.
It is included with the settings profile and lives in the users autostart folder but I can find no documentation on this - why it is there and what it is supposed to fix.
script in ~/.config/autostart resetting xfsettings
#/bin/sh
sleep 5
xfsettingsd --replace &
sleep 15
xfsettingsd --replace &
sleep 25
xfsettingsd --replace &
In the livefs - I have found that the xfce installation lacks certain pam configurations for lightdm whereas there is configurations for plasmalogin and kde.
The configuration in the livefs allows pam to accept a login if the user is member of the wheel group.
But if the manjaro-live script is racing the login daemon it is a hit or miss if the live user has been created or not where the latter will trigger the error message. This speculation is somewhat backed by the above mentioned fact - if you leave the error message long enough you can acknowledge the error - get to the login screen and login with the default manjaro password.
Looking at the Cinnamon edition - it uses lightdm as well - with slick-greeter instead of gtk-greeter and the Cinnamon edition does not exhibit the same behaviour when built against the current stable repo.
I am going to compare the Cinnamon and Xfce iso profiles - see if I can learn something from that comparison.
Perhaps @philm can provide some insight into this peculiar issue?
Please @philm help us understandā¦ and more importantly we need to fix itā¦ possibly in the manjaro-tools-livecd repository
EDIT 2026-07-10T05:13:00Z
I have come a bit closer - if I wait a couple of minutes, then acknowledge the error - the greeter comes up - only have to hit enter - partly autologin - only full autologin is now missing.
In my testing repo I have added pam configuration for lightdm to the livefs overlay.
Searching for the error reveals it is a somewhat common error.
https://sx.nix.dk/search?q=xfce lightdm unable to contact settings server
One topic on Gentoo 6 years ago suggested that the dbus was not build for X, which makes me think - I vaguely recall a package named dbus-x11 - but that does not exist anymore.
When the system fail and error out - the following is written to the file .xsession-errors in the live users home
Failed to connect to user scope bus via local transport: $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR not defined (consider using --machine=<user>@.host --user to connect to bus of other user)
dbus-update-activation-environment: error: unable to connect to D-Bus: Using X11 for dbus-daemon autolaunch was disabled at compile time, set your DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS instead
dbus-update-activation-environment: error: unable to connect to D-Bus: Using X11 for dbus-daemon autolaunch was disabled at compile time, set your DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS instead
Failed to connect to user scope bus via local transport: $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR not defined (consider using --machine=<user>@.host --user to connect to bus of other user)
dbus-update-activation-environment: error: unable to connect to D-Bus: Using X11 for dbus-daemon autolaunch was disabled at compile time, set your DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS instead
Looking at the error message I am thinking - the root cause is
Failed to connect to user scope bus via local transport: $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR not defined (consider using --machine=<user>@.host --user to connect to bus of other user)
The rest is just messages caused by the first error.
This leads me to [SOLVED] Failed to connect to bus: $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR not defined / Newbie Corner / Arch Linux Forums
This does not get me much closer but I do now understand that we need to address the missing variables $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR somehow.
I have tried to add a condition to the manjaro-live.service
Before=systemd-user-sessions.service systemd-logind.service
it is a race condition somewhere
Even with the above changes - the pam configs and the extended condition - if I reboot the same stick it may occasionally boot directly to desktop - if I acknowledge the error the greeter will reload and after waiting a short while, hit enter or click login and desktop loads.
I will have to check if the xfsettingsd reload script is causing this.
).
Date: 2026-07-10 14:26 UTC