I’ve been using Fedora for years and love it, stable, impressive and reliable. Some time ago I was troubleshooting an issue with my sound card (no sound) and I had to remove a package using dnf (I really don’t remember the name. I managed to fiz the problem with the sound but now I lost my login manager (think this is the name).
Now, every time the system starts I get into a shell (black, command line alike) where I’m prompt to login, after loging I’m using startx to get GUI to work. I kinda got used to it, but I gotta fix this now.
Would please someone help me? just tell me what you need to know, any output you guys need me to paste here?
Just updating…
The errors/warnings I see when I check the status of these services are somehow related with the issue I’m going trough???
You can find out what you removed by looking at the dnf history.
Knowing that will possible help understand what has broken.
But fedora 36 went end-of-life a long time ago.
It may be best for you to upgrade to a supported version.
You should be able to update from 36 to fedora 38 in one go.
I do have my doubts as you say this was a while ago, but I believe SDDM is the Display manager so here goes :
Could you provide the output of the following commands?
sudo dnf install sddm
If you have another Login manager installed we can sort that out later with some other commands.
After your reboot check to see if you can login and consider upgrading, if not :
cat /etc/sysconfig/desktop to check if sddm is the default.
Also, you are running F36 and as @barryascott pointed out, it’s EOL. YOu should consider upgrading to the latest release, the issue is you should probably do this one by one since F37 is also EOL.
Best case is to go F36>F37>F38>F39 , If you decide to do this, do you have any hardware prohibiting the upgrade?
Well, by this time running dnf history won’t help much because it happened quite long time ago (I even don’t remember when it was).
Indeed I want to upgrade to 38 or 39, but I think maybe better first fix this issue and have things working properly and only after that upgrade.
Furthermore I’m afraid if I don’t fix this, maybe this issue will move forward to the newer version as well, or even worse, compromise the upgrade and have a bigger issue as not booting or so.
dnf history won’t help, it was quite a long time ago.
I do not know what is the display manager.
This is what I got:
Last metadata expiration check: 0:07:17 ago on Thu 18 Apr 2024 12:28:11 AM EDT.
Package sddm-0.19.0^git20221025.fc24321-1.fc36.x86_64 is already installed.
Dependencies resolved.
Nothing to do.
Complete!
I did reinstall by the way and the issue persists
This is what I get :
cat: /etc/sysconfig/desktop: No such file or directory
Indeed I want to upgrade to 38 or 39, but I think maybe better first fix this issue and have things working properly and only after that upgrade.
Furthermore I’m afraid if I don’t fix this, maybe this issue will move forward to the newer version as well, or even worse, compromise the upgrade and have a bigger issue as not booting or so.
I’m now aware of any hardware I have that may prohibit the upgrade.
You’re right, but I remember when I uninstalled the package, some more got uninstalled too, guess they had the one I uninstalled as a dependency. Problem here is I don’t remember exactly the module I uninstalled
Alongside with dnf history is there a way I can check the full history of every packages installed/uninstalled?
@barryascott I just recovered a chat with a friend when I did seek help for the first time. This is the action the messed up everything: dnf remove pipewire
Problem is not what pipewire itself but the list of packages it uninstalled at the time.
I know now the date range it happened. is there any way to know the list of every package uninstalled indirectly by having pipewire as dependency?
You can ask dnf for the history of a specific package, dnf history pipewire
It will give you the transaction number.
Then you can ask dnf for the full details of that transaction dnf history info NNN.
@barryascott Indeed this sequence of actions guided me towards the solution. By checking the history info for that specific transaction I really got the list of packages that were uninstalled at that time.
So I reinstalled all of them again and one of them was gdm. After rebooting still no GUI login. After digging a little more I just discovered no login manager was activated, both sddm and gdm were disabled somehow and coudn’t go up.
So I installed ‘kdm’ and voilá, it worked like a charm
Thank you @barryascott and everyone else who took precious time helping me
Next step shall be upgrading to a newer version. just hope it will go smooth.
How do I mark as fixed and close this ??? (sorry, not familiar with…)
@airitos Just as an Aside, If you are going to upgrade, I recommend not jumping. I know & understand Fedora supports the 2 release jump, but I have seen all too often it break. F36 has been EOL and so has F37. . . Keep us posted if you have upgrade issues later ona new thread.
