"Could not start Display server on vt 2"

Hi everyone…I was here having issues a couple weeks ago after my upgrade to Fedora 35, which we resolved back then, but now after recent kernel updates I once again can’t boot up into KDE. Unlike the last time, it’s not the nVidia driver causing the problem.

I went through the error logs and, this is what happens at the point where the boot process stops:

Jan 23 11:50:47 localhost.localdomain sddm[1291]: No graphical seats found, attempt to start one on the main console anyway…
Jan 23 11:50:47 localhost.localdomain sddm[1291]: Failed to read display number from pipe
Jan 23 11:50:47 localhost.localdomain sddm[1291]: Attempt 1 starting the Display server on vt 2 failed
Jan 23 11:50:49 localhost.localdomain sddm[1291]: Failed to read display number from pipe
Jan 23 11:50:49 localhost.localdomain sddm[1291]: Attempt 2 starting the Display server on vt 2 failed
Jan 23 11:50:51 localhost.localdomain sddm[1291]: Failed to read display number from pipe
Jan 23 11:50:51 localhost.localdomain sddm[1291]: Attempt 3 starting the Display server on vt 2 failed
Jan 23 11:50:51 localhost.localdomain sddm[1291]: Could not start Display server on vt 2
Jan 23 11:50:52 localhost.localdomain systemd[1]: NetworkManager-dispatcher.service: Deactivated successfully.

I tried googling some of those error messages, hardly found any results and found no solutions. Has anyone else here seen anything like this? Any idea what’s causing the problem?

Hi, if it happen after kernel update and you’re still have Nvidia driver, most likely your Nvidia driver failed to rebuilt the module for new kernel.

But if you don’t have Nvidia driver installed, on boot list screen, pres e, then remove rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau nvidia-drm.modeset=1 if it present (you could also check in /etc/modprobe.d/ directory if you have conf to blacklist nouveau). After that press ctrl + x to continue booting. If SDDM show up, select wayland instead xorg since maybe there are leftover xorg init from Nvidia driver in your home dir or /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Make permanent the kernel parameter with sudo grubby --remove-args="rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau nvidia-drm.modeset=1" --update-kernel=ALL

Hmm…REMOVE the blacklist? That never occurred to me. It’s not in the script on the boot list screen but I do have a conf file in the modprobe.d directory. I’ll delete that and tell you how that turns out.

Thanks for the reply, BTW. All I’ve found googling this issue was people having this problem in Arch Linux, thus all the advice I found was Arch-specific.

EDIT: wait…I clearly didn’t read it completely. You wrote “if you don’t have Nvidia driver installed” and somehow I completely missed that. I do have the Nvidia driver installed.

Since what you said about the driver failing to recompile looked familiar I went back to the discussion over my last problem during which I updated the Nvidia driver, and found someone else recommended installing the RPMFusion driver and then “Once that is done you will no longer need to worry about manually recompiling the driver module with every kernel update (which may happen as often as weekly).” So that’s the problem! Now I’m off to get RPMFusion…

I made that recommendation to you to use the nvidia driver from rpmfusion. Remember that in order to avoid conflicts you should remove the driver installed directly from nvidia before you install the driver from rpmfusion.

I’ve just today (belatedly) removed the proprietary nVidia driver and installed RPMFusion. It works fine so far. The real test will be whenever the next kernel update comes out.