Xorg/window manager fails on startup

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1

On my new install of nixos, I boot a tty with the message that the xorg failed to load, and to prompt
systemctl status display-manager for details, which can be found here, along with my current configuration:

Fortunately, logging into the tty shell and simply running systemctl start display-manager boots me to lightdm. I read this xorg page in the nix wiki, but that doesn’t suggest to do anything I’m not already doing.

What system settings should I investigate?

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2

I’ve tested the following, which suggests to me that this is a trivial change somewhere in the configuration file having to do with starting the display-manager service.

After a nixos-rebuild switch && reboot, the display manager service fails to start.
Entering systemctl start display-manager starts lightdm.
Rebooting fails to start the display manager.
Entering systemctl enable display-manager, and rebooting successfully starts the display manager on startup.

The offending section, if there is one, seems likely to be in this section, though I note that
nixos-option services.xserver.enable and nixos-option services.xserver.displayManager.lightdm.enable both return true, both before and after a system rebuild/reboot.

  services.xserver.enable = true;
  services.xserver.displayManager.lightdm.enable = true;
  #services.xserver.displayManager.lightdm.background = "somepath";
  services.xserver.windowManager.stumpwm.enable = true;
  services.xserver.layout = "dvorak";
  services.xserver.xkbOptions = "ctrl:nocaps";
  services.xserver.libinput.enable = true; # Enable touchpad support

This also looks I’ve experimented with removing the lightdm line, which seems to be the default setting anyhow. What other things should I try?

3

clue-ish: on startup, after 2.5 seconds I get several errors:

nvidia-gpu 0000: i2c timeout error e0000000
ucsi_ccg i2c_transfer failed -110
[ OK ] Stopped X11 Server.
Starting X11 Server...
[ OK ] Started X11 Server
[ OK ] Stopped X11 Server.
Starting X11 Server...
[ OK ] Started X11 Server 
...some backlight drivrs load...
[ OK ] Stopped X11 Server.
[FAILED] Failed to start X11 Server
See 'systemctl status display-manager.service1 for details.

It’s weird that:

  1. the nvidia error happened, suggesting I should go look at nvidia-related wiki pages
  2. I’m not sure what the ucsi_ccg driver is, so I gave it a quick look, and found this post, which I’m going to give a shot, blacklisting the nvidia driver.
    This arch forum post suggests that the latter error is probably harmless though.
4

Those errors are harmless, it’s a red herring :slight_smile: I’ve been running X fine with them showing up for months now, it’s a known bug in the kernel with a fix here that somehow hasn’t made it into mainline yet: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206653#c19 (seems down at the minute, but whenever it comes back up…).

I struggle to recall context, but I think it was about attempting to load a certain driver for GPUs that don’t actually support it.

5

Given that Xorg fails, you probably want to look at the Xorg logs: journalctl -t xsession . Depending on your configuration other useful logs might live under /var/log/X and ~/.xsession-errors.

6

Thanks for saving me a goose chase then. It looks like .xsession-errors is empty, but I put up the results of journalctl and /var/log/X.0.log on my gists. Still looking through them, would be razzed if you’d care to take a look with me.

7

You seem to only share the last couple of lines of your log there, probably copied from out of the terminal? If you pipe the journalctl output to a file, it’ll skip the pager and dump the entire logs to a file:

journalctl -t xsession > file.txt

There may also be other log files in /var/log/X that’ll contain info from previous invocations. If you copy out just the 0 one it’ll be from the current session, i.e. probably the working one, which isn’t that useful here :wink:

Any reason you have network config there? I hope that PSK is censored.

8

because we’re all rushing to your address to log onto your wifi.

9

Fortunately, I do indeed censor my wifi passphrase, but come on over, Christmas LAN party at mine

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10

:slight_smile: Mostly concerned about key reuse, but I was wondering why that was there and if you’d seen networking.wireless.networks.

11

if you setting you other passwords, to your wifi password, then you have other problems! :slight_smile:

12

Hi, I had the exact same problem and checking out what caused systemd to fail:

Process: 1190 ExecStart=/nix/store/hphsx5383075c6l7s4kvnkp9hmjww4gz-unit-script-display-manager-start/bin/display-manager-start

it just started lightdm as far as I could tell
(/nix/store/hphsx5383075c6l7s4kvnkp9hmjww4gz-unit-script-display-manager-start/bin/display-manager-start):

#!/nix/store/dznl6xxx7bp9xynmsbrjjba9x726m3f9-bash-5.1-p8/bin/bash -e
export PATH=/nix/store/52yp9irkazd3157yas9vvg7s2p39s2b7-lightdm-1.30.0/sbin:$PATH
exec /nix/store/52yp9irkazd3157yas9vvg7s2p39s2b7-lightdm-1.30.0/sbin/lightdm

and changing the display-manager to sddm in my case solved the issue.

P.S. calling sudo lightdm –-test-mode --debug showed an error. However I forgot to save the output. But if you are interested, I can revert to lightdm and try to replicate the messaeg.

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