[SOLVED] (Sort Of) Mystery of the BLACK SCREEN

[desertcat]

Well the Mystery of the BLACK SCREEN at login has been SOLVED... SORT OF. I noted that it appeared that I was missing a display manager. I had stopped using gdm because of a runaway process that was eating up my /var partition.

https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic ... 47&t=62294

I SOLVED that problem by installing sddm and booting gdm to the curb.

https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic ... 47&t=62431

I have been very happy with sddm and all the creatures in the forest lived in peace and harmony... until CentOS 7.5 came along. On a hunch after getting to where the login should have appeared I hit Ctl+Alt+F2 but this time instead of logging in as my user I logged in as root and ran:

systemctl stop display-manager
systemctl disable sddm
systemctl enable gdm
syastem start display-manager

... within 1-2 minutes I had a normal login page. I then tried reversing the process only to arrive at the familiar BLACK SCREEN. Ctl+Alt+F2 => User + Password => startx => and I'm into home GUI. I disabled sddm and then enabled gdm and I am taken to a login page.

It would appear that CentOS 7.5 has broken sddm. It may be premature to have reached that conclusion as this is the first "roll-over" for the "Trashcan Monster", but I fear that when CentOS 7.5 hits the mirrors that sddm is likely to remain broken for my workstation that went from 7.3 => 7.4 without any problem. Maybe TrevorH can shed some light on this problem for me.

[TrevorH]

Never heard of sddm but it comes from EPEL so raise a bug on bugzilla.redhat.com in the Fedora EPEL section and report it. If it hasn't already been reported, better search first.

[DaveAtFraud]

I've had sort of the opposite solution for getting Mate working on C8 stream. I tried both gdm and lightdm and I can get the main console to open but not a VMware VM. Finally ended up changing the boot default to multi-user.taget (aka runlevel 3) and just doing a startx at the console to get to a Mate graphical environment. The VMware VM also now works with Mate. The symptom I kept seeing on the VM was somethng along the lines of "Unable to set name on system bus." You also need:

[dave@C8stream01 ~] cat .xinitrc
exec /usr/bin/mate-session

I also tried several variations of:

[dave@C8stream01 ~ .vnc] cat xstartup
echo "DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS"

unset SESSION_MANAGER
unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS

exec /usr/bin/mate-session &

with a uniform lack of success.