sddm and nvidia not allowing user past password entry

vaxbrat · l33t Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 731 Location: DC Burbs

Finally got around to backing my way into plasma and having to give up kdm. Anyway I sucessfully got a stable kde desktop with a radeon card to let me use sddm as the replacement. However I had an unstable desktop with a nvidia card and nvidia-driver setup that just sits there after I hit return enter on keypad or tab after doing the user's password. I had a bit more success trying to use lightdm in place of sddm so that I could at least get a password entered.

To further muddle things, I just now had to clone the stable ati desktop over to another box whose system drive died. That one also has an nvidia card. After I emerged the nvidia drivers, the sddm that was just fine with ATI support and password entry is now showing the exact same password stall while using nvidia. What gives?

On a somewhat related note, I wish the gui nazi's would cease and desist the whole showing list of users thing by default without realizing that it's a security issue (or a PITA if you are in a huge directory). :evil:

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8936

Did you add sddm user to video group?
What version of pam is installed?

vaxbrat · l33t Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 731 Location: DC Burbs

It wouldn't be sddm or pam because, like I said, this system drive is literally a clone of a working sddm setup taken from an AMD piledriver system running with an ati adapter. It went into another piledriver that runs an nvidia card instead.

I suspect the plasma session for the user may be the culprit. I also tried a blank Xsession session and got a background but not much else. You would think that if sddm had troubles starting up something it would at least pop up an error box and not act like the password never got entered.

davidm · Guru Joined: 26 Apr 2009 Posts: 557 Location: US

This may sound stupid but it happens. Which DE/WM are you loading in sddm? There can be plasma media center, plasma and I believe plasma (failsafe). Do they all do the same thing? If you have (or want to try) something like fluxbox installed and you try to login using it does it then work?

I vaguely recall a problem (weird bug) with the theme/wallpaper where if set to some such thing it would behave as you are describing. Can you try creating a sddm.conf and/or changing the theme to perhaps Oxygen or something else to experiment?
(Here is a similar problem they saw in Arch Linux a few months back: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=207780 )

Also check the Gentoo and Arch sddm Wiki entries as well as the man page. You can hide users if you like. You can do this within your sddm.conf.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/SDDM
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SDDM

tomtom69 · Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2016 1:40 pm Post subject:

I tried to update a system copy with nvidia drivers and also got similar and strange results like unresponsive X session after typing sddm password.
The problem was nvidia opengl which seems not to work with sddm/plasma. "eselect opengl list" and selecting xorg-x11 for opengl cured this. However I do not know whether this imcapts performance, but it was necessary to be able to start the freshly emerged kde 5 / sddm system.

vaxbrat · l33t Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 731 Location: DC Burbs

I'm back to looking at my startup issues with nvidia today.

I have two gentoo stable amd64 boxes, one with amd radeon, one with nvidia, and then a third unstable amd64 box with an nvidia. The stable nvidia box is literally a clone of the stable amd box with nvidia-drivers taking over the graphics. Both nvidia boxes have session startup issues and I'm now back to trying to just startup from a console as user with startkde so that I can strace and debug more easily. As I have noted before, the radeon based box appears to work getting plasma up, but it is a few steps backward by breaking plug and play of my media and other missing features.

All three have the following preserved library conflict with kwin4 wanting to get back in instead of kwin5 and I want to get this resolved hopefully by just unmerging kwin4:

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8936

No, you need to unmerge the package that requires kwin:4, which is kdeartwork-styles in your case.

vaxbrat · l33t Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 731 Location: DC Burbs

I would have thought that there were still deps on kdeartwork-styles since there was a 5.x version, but emerge -C only killed it and nothing else. That also worked without problems on a 4.14 version I got rid of over on a hardened profile.

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8936

vaxbrat · l33t Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 731 Location: DC Burbs

Ok so why does my unstable have a /var/db/pkg/kde-apps/kdeartwork-styles-15.08.3?

Maybe somebody decided to kill the ~amd64 ebuild between apr 6th and when you got that listing

vaxbrat · l33t Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 731 Location: DC Burbs

I also have that ebuild still merged on one of my stable boxes from apr 2nd.

mirekm · Posted: Sun May 01, 2016 7:06 am Post subject:

You can try to create directory:
/var/lib/sddm
owned by user sddm.

After that you, when you login, sddm will put there some information, that could be useful for you.

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8936

vaxbrat · l33t Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 731 Location: DC Burbs

Login session still cycles immeditately back to lightdm when trying to start a plasma session. I moved the old user's .kde4 out of the way and tried again. The resulting .xession-errors looks like:

vaxbrat · l33t Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 731 Location: DC Burbs

I don't have a panel at the bottom with opengl set to nvidia, but at least it re-appears when I go back to xorg.

Meanwhile over on a kaveri running gentoo hardened profile, I can't even run startkde by hand. It tries, but I'm guessing grsecurity is screwing up things. So I just have good ole xterms without even a window manager there. I should emerge twm for old times sake to see whether that works

mirekm · Posted: Mon May 02, 2016 2:48 am Post subject: Re: making some progress

vaxbrat · l33t Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 731 Location: DC Burbs

I'll look into sddm again after I have finished updating the stable profile nvidia box. I'm switching over from udev to eudev so there are 300+ ebuilds getting re-emerged with static-libs turned on. I wanted to make sure that any thought of a systemd use flag sneaking in and mucking things up was removed from the equation. Don't know why I let that get past me all of this time even with -systemd set :roll:

Things on the unstable nvidia box look like this but I don't remember whether I put user sddm into video before or after this attempt:

vaxbrat · l33t Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 731 Location: DC Burbs

After messing around with startx and then running a startkde by hand from one of the resulting xterms, I noticed the nvidia opengl settings is indeed making my kde taskbar basically invisible. If I go back to to xorg on the opengl setting I can get it to appear again. Does anybody know if or what version this gets fixed? I tried turning off the compositor and then restarting with nvidia opengl enabled, but that doesn't appear to work. It's very annoying since the gpu fan blows high and video playback basically blows. Also forget about any 3d such as game playing in wine.

On the bright side, kdm appears to still work although it will break the next time I need to emerge it: