Hey everyone,
my main rig had no internet for a few months so yesterday it was finally time to update my Obarun EFISTUB system running SDDM and KDE.
This led to a problem where after updating the user who had started the update could not log in to the DE anymore where SDDM threw a message "Could not sync environment to dbus." I searched a lot for this and it usually relates to systemd. I could not solve it at all. I had another user present on the system who could successfully still log in normally though. Weird...
I decided to start over. Like I always do...and it's almost always a bad idea...
I used Obarun_x86_64-2018-09.iso with the minimal install and took about hour and a half to get wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd to work with a shared Wifi connection...this sure was my fault.
I then proceeded to the usual install procedure, chose Plasma as DE and after downloading and installing I modprobed efivars and mounted them inside the new system with chroot. (Thanks for the easy access option Eric). This way I was able to use efibootmgr to set up EFISTUB instead of a boot manager. I chose to have the first created user called obarun.
First boot up throws several dbus errors
[ 2.335993] udevd[406]: specified group 'render' unknown
[ 2.336121] udevd[406]: specified group 'kvm' unknown
[ 2.786312] udevd[415]: ignoring invalid mode '@ DEV_KVM_MODE@ '
[ 3.094220] udevd[419]: ignoring invalid mode '@ GROUP_RENDER_MODE@ '
[ 6.546190] udevd[418]: ignoring invalid mode '@ GROUP_RENDER_MODE@ '
where the cursor gets stuck blinking and I can use some keyboard magic combinations to get the login prompt showing.
Once at the prompt I can log in with the created user and it auto starts x and the chosen DE fine.
From there I wanted to create another user from within KDE. So I did.
When I log out and at the login prompt access with the new user I just log into console. No X. I checked .xinitrc .bash_profile .bashrc and such but they are exactly the same as for the user created by the install script.
Then when I manually run '$ xinit' from the console, I get a bunch of X errors, one of them being the before mentioned "Could not sync environment to dbus."
I managed to silence the first two dbus messages by doing '# groupadd render' and '# groupadd kvm' but the other three still persist. Also the more worrying issue is the
newly created users not running x automatically although .xinitrc has the usual exec ck-session-launch startkde. This is very unsatisfying to be honest.
Edit: I checked ~/.local/share/sddm/xorg-session.log and it says:
startkde: Starting up...
dbus-update-activation-environment: error: unable to connect to D-Bus: Server address of type unix was missing argument path or abstract
startkde: Could not sync environment to dbus.
Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion
Edit2: Gentoo has already traced this:
https://github.com/gentoo/eudev/issues/160
and also found a temporal workaround:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1087646.html?sid=da391f6b4ee3fc65430f17bdd2f9e52b
Edit3: The mentioned work around solved the udevd messages. I still get the fatal message "Could not sync environment to dbus." though. This is critical since
I cannot log into X with any user other than the one created by the installer.