Hi everyone, I used to be active on the old dev.getsol.us domain, as mate-user, first post here.
My Solus Mate isn't booting properly. The last update I installed was Week 25, 2025 from Software Centre, the graphical interface.
The error I see is lightdm.service failed to start.
At boot up I pressed Alt + F3, to get to the terminal interface, then ran "sudo eopkg up" to install all updates, just for this Week 26, 2025 sync.
My Solus Mate install is from 2017-08-15 (15 August 2017). I found this from running "eopkg history" and pressing End on the keyboard to jump down to Operation #1.
I really hope I can fix this Solus Mate install with help from someone here.
As an aside, I installed Solus 4.5 XFCE v4.18 Beta on a cheap €200 HP laptop last year 2024, now it's on Solus 4.7 XFCE v4.20 Beta. I think that laptop also had boot problems a few weeks back, but I fixed it somehow by going into terminal with Alt + F3 and rebuilding the database with "sudo eopkg rdb" ?
That HP laptop with Solus XFCE runs great, it's fast, light and stable! Now I'm a fan of XFCE, since it's easy enough to add Mate desktop apps to a Solus XFCE install 👍✅
Fortunately I have a Solus 4.7 XFCE Beta Live USB, so I can work off that if I need to access files from my laptop, which isn't necessary for the moment.
Back to my Solus Mate laptop not booting, I remember I left it unplugged and the battery must have died. When I tried to boot, it showed the error "failed to start lightdm.service".
Is it possible that the battery running out and maybe the laptop going into hibernate caused this problem?
I started my first (office) job a few months ago, where I brought along a very old Toshiba Satellite laptop with Solus Mate installed on a HDD. It works fine, but I'm thinking of installing Solus XFCE on it. This Toshiba laptop is left in the office as a backup, in case someone has trouble with the Windows desktops and needs to quickly access the internet with Firefox web browser or open documents, PDF files etc from a USB stick.
This place where I work, it has an auditorium, and I was told there's a plan to install a newer desktop in the office, and the old desktop will be moved to the auditorium where it will function as a sound source. I've mentioned that I use Linux, and the sound engineer/IT guy in the building has used some form of Linux before, maybe Ubuntu, but something didn't work well enough.
It will be my task to install Linux on this old desktop, which most likely will be Solus XFCE !
Hopefully it goes smoothly and sound plays fine. I was told it will be OBS that will be used, which I've seen is available in the Software Centre on Solus.
I guess I'll have to write a short document explaining how this Solus XFCE desktop would have to be updated every week, maybe every Mon/Tue so that any bugs are fixed from the Fri/Sat sync.
At the moment, the IT guy has to connect his laptop every time for events in the auditorium that require sound. Most likely that's a Windows laptop.
It will be cool if Solus XFCE works fine on the old desktop computer! I can say I made 2025 the year of the Linux desktop for this organisation 😄👍
The supervisor said they may also buy an SSD for this old desktop, which should help it run faster too. Maybe if the desktop is a success, the Toshiba laptop might get a SSD upgrade too.
Just want to say you're all doing amazing work with Solus, probably the most stable rolling release Linux distribution! And now with the XFCE spin, which itself is so stable and fast even labelled as a Beta, I can only hope more people switch to Solus to prevent their Windows laptops becoming obsolete.
Sorry for the long first post here!
Hope someone can help me fix my boot problems with Solus Mate!
