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19.09 + lightdm + home-manager cannot log in #70142

Open Ericson2314 opened 5 years ago

Ericson2314 commented 5 years ago

Describe the bug

When I tried 19.09 (https://github.com/Ericson2314/nixos-configuration/commit/4182b732eb1b07cc6fa0070108e75ffa9584a531 should be representative, I am booting from an old nixos generation with that ATM), LightDM no longer had me under the easy-access dropdown list of users. When I logged in by typing my username instead, the login failed, and I couldn't find anything fresh in:

  1. ~/.xsesssion-errors
  2. /var/log/lightdm.log 3 journalctl --user <stuff>

I temporary switched display managers to slim, and that did work. (well my user systemd units seemed a bit messed up, but I am not sure that is releted.)

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior:

  1. NixOS 19.09
  2. lightdm as desktop mananger
  3. home manager controlled xsession
  4. Try to log in

Expected behavior A clear and concise description of what you expected to happen.

Screenshots If applicable, add screenshots to help explain your problem.

Additional context

@matthewbauer thought that perhaps there was some dbus thing was down, and so lightdm neither learned who the list of users was, nor had enough information do the log in.

Metadata Please run nix run nixpkgs.nix-info -c nix-info -m and paste the result.

Maintainer information:

# a list of nixpkgs attributes affected by the problem
attribute:
# a list of nixos modules affected by the problem
module:
worldofpeace commented 5 years ago

Yeah, the only thing that could be "some dbus thing was down" would probably be accountsservice.

Anything funny going on in the files at /var/lib/AccountsService/users, for example SystemAccount=True?

worldofpeace commented 5 years ago

home manager controlled xsession

I believe we've disabled xterm in 19.09 in some manner, so perhaps try enabling services.xserver.desktopManager.xterm.enable. IIRC home-manager was somehow relying on that.

Ericson2314 commented 5 years ago

@worldofpeace Yup! services.xserver.desktopManager.xterm.enable = true fixed it. Thanks! @rycee heads up for installation instructions etc.

Now that just leaves eh missing user list, which I should open a separate issue for.

Ericson2314 commented 5 years ago

Regardless of home manager, there probably should be some sort of state dir or warning or something that xterm isn't on by default?

Ralith commented 4 years ago

It looks like exactly this same issue has happened again in 20.03, which resulted in an unpleasant half-hour of vterm configuration debugging when I updated. lightdm requires some sessions defined to let you log in, and there are none defined by default. Enabling any session at all fixes things, because the nixos session wrapper script tries ~/.xsession before doing what it's supposed to.

I see https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/68371 might have been a fix, but it's been abandoned for a few months.

worldofpeace commented 4 years ago

@Ralith The solution is to enable some sort of desktop manager, xterm. It was in the release notes when this was relevant. The bug is more of a home-manager issue, so it lives there https://github.com/rycee/home-manager/issues/1116. The docs could be updated there to enable xterm, or it could provide a nixos module with an empty one.

Ralith commented 4 years ago

It was in the release notes when this was relevant.

This was not in the 20.03 release notes, and it worked fine before updating, presumably due to the above reversions. Indeed I carefully reviewed the 20.03 release notes before updating, and this did not prevent my system from being broken.

worldofpeace commented 4 years ago

@Ralith What I meant by "when this was relevant" is the issue existed in 19.09. So it was in the 19.09 release notes, because it was where the change happened. That wasn't meant to be a jab at your competence, you couldn't have been aware because the issue wasn't a 20.03 change. It's indeed interesting you'd encounter this now though, did you change your stateVersion?

Ralith commented 4 years ago

No, my stateVersion remains at 19.09.

rycee commented 4 years ago

@Ralith An alternative might be to do something like the suggestion here: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/opening-i3-from-home-manager-automatically/4849/8

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