LightDM Fails after Upgrade

[gregkedro]

I'm away from my home office right now (at work), so I might not have all the specifics, but I wanted to see if anyone else is having this problem.

I downloaded the newest AMD64 ISO of Kali, dd'ed it to a USB, and installed to my desktop hard drive (triple boot with Win10 and Debian). The install worked fine except for my three monitors; nouveau kept calling my AOC monitor the Dell monitor, and the Dell monitor the Acer, etc. My mouse would visually show up on one monitor but all the clicks would be registered on another monitor. Crazy. I could not get it to work, so I decided to install the NVidia drivers (using the Kali docs as reference).

I have an NVidia RTX 3060 Ti with two Display Port monitors and one HDMI monitor plugged into it.

When I installed the NVidia drivers, the kernel upgraded from 5.18 to 5.19. On reboot I got a black screen with one error message at the top: "[FAILED] Failed to start Light Display Manager."

I Googled and tried fixes for hours. I reinstalled and did a full-upgrade; same lightdm failure. I reinstalled and did a dist-upgrade; same.

I tried installing sddm, gdm3, and some other dm I can't remember the name of. None would work. Each would boot and then drop me off at a black screen with a blinking cursor in the top left corner.

It's left me without a functioning Kali system. And it makes me think the problem resides in the new kernel (5.19, I believe), or some incompatibility with the new kernel.

Couple questions:
1. Has anyone else experienced this problem?
2. Would anyone have any idea on how to fix this or at least ideas about where to go from here?

My next idea to try this evening (after work) is to reinstall Kali and then try to install the NVidia drivers without upgrading the kernel (which I think I can do if I install the correct headers, etc.). If I can keep 5.18, I think maybe it'll work. Maybe.

Thanks.

gk

[gregkedro]

I was able to isolate my problems last night, so I'm going update this and then considered it "solved" for now.

The LightDM failure is caused by some incompatibility with the NVidia drivers on my machine. The display manager boots fine until I install the NVidia drivers, and then it barfs on boot and throws the FAILURE message about LightDM failing to load. I could install additional display managers (sddm, for example) just fine until I installed the NVidia drivers, and then no DM would work. All that I tried would hang during the boot sequence. So, there's that.

The whole issue of installing the NVidia drivers came up because the display configuration in XFCE would not recognize my monitors correctly and would not correctly store the monitor set-up. When I couldn't get this to work, I tried to jump ship and go with NVidia instead of nouveau and got all the problems I mentioned above.

The issue with the display configuration (Applications >> Settings >> Display) comes up with trying to get my three monitors in the right position. I drag and drop the monitors within the settings app, get the three monitors in the right position, and then hit "Apply." The app doesn't maintain the monitors in the right position. And (what's worse) the app swaps monitor displays but not their pixel maps. Let me explain...

I have three monitors, left to right on my setup: Acer (DP), AOC (HDMI), Dell (DP). I'll get them set up in that order, apply (save), and the Display app will move the AOC to the right and the Dell to the left. But that's not all...

Even though the app SHOWS the Dell to now be in the middle and the AOC to be on the right... When you click inside the right monitor (physically the Dell, but in the Display app showing as the AOC), the mouse click occurs in the middle monitor (physically the AOC, but in the Display app showing as the Dell).

That behavior was consistent throughout all my endeavors to fix this mess. And I never could figure out what to do about it.

I think maybe (?) I could work around the problem with an xorg.conf file... But, I tried a couple set-ups and couldn't get anything to work.

So that's it. I'm done. I can install Kali and run it with two monitors, but not three. And I cannot install the NVidia drivers to see if that would allow me to run three monitors.

My next "fix" is to buy two large, wide, curved monitors and see if I can get them to work. :-)

gk

[Fred Sheehan]

Have a loo at this;

https://hackersterminal.com/how-to-i...on-kali-linux/