Failed to start lightdm light display manager, after restart

David26

Hi,
I can't use my Laserjet printer pro M203 since few weeks. (it is "blocked, can't print anything).
So I decide to desinstall Cups (and dependancies), and to resinstall it.
But, bad idea. After that Firefox say "relaunch me". I do that, but Firefox didn't restart.
So I stopped computer with Solus.
Restard, but black screen with "Failed to start lightdm. service - light display manager"
So I am blocked here!

I see in this forum the command "clr-boot-manager"
I try on console mode (with ...$ ), but "command not found"
I try "update" --> command not found

So I don't know what to do...
Thanks for help!
(I have 4.5 Resilience 6.8.7)

David26

here are screenshots for
sudo systemctl status lightdm
and sudo lightdm --test-mode --debug

thanks for help

TraceyC

I'm sorry you're having problems with Solus. The troubleshooting section of the Help Center has information on recovering a system in different scenarios. The first thing I would try is to run updates and then check for broken packages.

Perform the full system update:

sudo eopkg up

Then fix any broken packages with

sudo eopkg check | grep Broken | awk '{print $4}' | xargs sudo eopkg it --reinstall

David26

thanks
for the "sudo eopkg up" it says ok
for the second one it gives a long list of choice of commands... (about arg )

Sebastian

You could also try to undo the removal of cups and dependencies with a rollback

David26

ok, I try "sudo eopkg history -t number", but it says number is not known command.
And I can't see the long list of commands for eokpg help, because I don't know how to go up of the list....

I used eopkg help | less to see all list, but I don't see anything about number...

Staudey

David26 ok, I try "sudo eopkg history -t number", but it says number is not known command.

You have to first run eopkg history, then find the number of the operation ("Operation #xxxx") before you removed cups. Then run sudo eopkg history -t <number> with that operation number (replacing the "number" with the actual number)

Staudey

I'd definitely go the route @Sebastian suggested. cups is a pretty foundational package. By removing it you have also removed quite a number of other important packages.

Just for reference these are the packages that depend on cups and will be removed if it is removed:

cups-devel canon-ufriilt-common opera-stable
mongodb-compass budgie-control-center x2goclient freerdp
mullvad museeks wire libreoffice-common discord pycups
simplenote vivaldi-snapshot qt6-base
epson-inkjet-printer-escpr gutenprint signal-desktop
heroic-games-launcher kitematic bitwarden-desktop etcher
element vscode cups-filters streamlink-twitch-gui
libgtk-2 cups-pk-helper obs-studio logseq mailspring
beekeeper-studio qt5-base libgtk-4 keybase boomaga
vivaldi-stable darktable gnome-settings-daemon samba
ghostscript pencil scribus dymo-cups-drivers libgtk-3
cups-32bit print-manager freerdp2 hplip cef-minimal
gnome-control-center splix cups-dbginfo brlaser brave
hplip-drivers

Some of those, like libgtk-3 are VERY important on GTK-based desktops like Budgie/MATE/GNOME/xfce

Rolling back to the point before you removed cups and it's reverse dependencies is the best way to hopefully get your system back in order.

David26

Staudey
ok I understand better.
I had reinstall cups just after remove it, and I thought that dependancies comes again with it...
to be sure, I go back to little befor, April 24

Sebastian

If you go too far back in time than there is a chance that you had a package installed that got deprecated from the repo in the meantime, and then the rollback fails. It should totally be fine to just roll back to shortly before you removed cups and dependencies.

Edit: forget what I just posted. I misread your post and thought you wanted to rollback to beginning of april.

David26

It suppress all pagkages until April 24
and after that it sees to check everything to updates
sudo eopkg up said ok
So I can try reeboot...
OK nice it works!
Thanks a lot

(I steel have my print problem to solve, I have to post in forum for that...)

Staudey

David26 It suppress all pagkages until April 24
and after that it sees to check everything to updates

I don't understand what you're trying to say. Did you successfully complete a rollback with sudo eopkg history -t XXX ?

David26

Staudey
Yes I do the rollback, ant it's ok now :-)
(sorry for bad english)

Sebastian

Congratulations. You just saved your system.
Now, it's probably still a good idea to check for broken packages.
And if your printer still doesn't work anymore, you might want to open a seperate issue for troubleshooting this problem.

David26

Sebastian
ok, so I run now eopkg check
and after sudo eopkg up
and lots of package are going to be updates...

Sebastian

David26 and lots of package are going to be updates...

Yes, it's friday. New updates were released like an hour ago.