I have just installed nixos on a brand new laptop following these directions, which are specific to my hardware. Everything seems to have gone smoothly, except for the Lightdm display manager, which doesn’t load (I have a back screen with a blinking prompt). Unfortunately, I have set displayManager.autorun = true;and I cannot switch to a console by hitting CTRL + ALT + 1. Can you recommend any way I get a back on a console and disable the auto-login?
Note: unfortunately both the configuration I see displayed in the bootloader have autologin enabled, so reverting to a previous version doesn’t seem to be an option
First suggestion is to boot from USB. Another option is if you’re lucky to use GRUB. Modify kernel boot params during boot - set runlevel 3 and boot into text-mode.
To be more specific about booting into text mode, in GRUB and systemd-boot you can edit the kernel command-line by pressing e on the menu entry. If you add systemd.unit=multi-user.target, it will not start the display manager, allowing you to log in to a text console.
Thanks for the tip @danbst@lheckemann lheckemann!
somehow the problem disappeared after two reboots, when I was prompted for the normal user login and I had the chance to set displayManager.autorun to false. However, I am now struggling setting up XWindows. Will post the details shortly!
I hit a problem like this about 2 weeks ago. For some reason I couldn’t use ctrl+FX to swap TTYs either. Thankfully I had SSH installed and was able to login and resolve the issue from another machine.
It made me remove auto-login though; it had me trapped in an infinite loop of failed Xsession launches.