Gdm3 does not start

Hardware
1

I have encountered some show-stopping issues on a freshly delivered librem 13 laptop.

  • The screensaver would not allow me to enter my password to unlock the session. I had to use loginctl in a separate tty.
  • On restart, gdm3 will not start at all. F2 will drop me in in a tty just fine, but I cannot startx as the system didn’t boot with systemd, and service gdm3 start fails silently.

dpkg-reconfigure reports that the gdm3 install is broken, but I am having major problems reinstalling since I cannot easily connect to wifi without the window manager and a valid gnome-session.

Any advice would be helpful here.

2

Assuming lots of things here, but once in tty, try the command nmtui connect
Chances are you’ll get wifi connection as easily as in gnome session.

3

I managed to resolve this, which involved the following steps:

  • Get a USB-ethernet cable
  • Plug in ethernet cable
  • Get interface name of ethernet connection when activated, add to /etc/network/interfaces, by adding the line iface enx00e04c68001e inet dhcp so that a DNS lease would be acquired. (Your interface name will vary).
  • Once in, I reinstalled gdm3, and found I also had to reinstall the entire task-gnome-desktop.

Following this, I was able to log in again to a graphical shell. I also made sure to install the network-manager package so that I would have access to nmtui in the future.

Later I encountered significant issues with start up jobs blocking boot. This was mitigated by removing plymouth from the system, so for now I have a less pretty boot, but it is much more reliable.