I did a fresh install of Rocky 9.4 on a VM that has no GPU support. After the installation an reboot the Gnome login screen appears. I logged in, and ran
sudo dnf groupinstall -y ‘Development Tools’
then rebooted. Gnome login no longer displays and /var/log/messages shows errors related to gnome-session trying to use GL acceleration and failing.
What type of install “Server with GUI”, or something different?
If the VM has no GPU, where did this Gnome login screen appear? I mean did you start the VM and then connect to it (in some way) that allows you to see graphical UI?
I’m performing a “Server with GUI” install. I use Proxmox VE as a hypervisor for internal infrastructure. PVE has the ability to get a console to the VM which is how I was verifying that the Gnome login sccreen worked, and then didn’t work. I also installed XRDP and was able to RDP to the VM and get a full screen desktop and could no longer RDP in after installing ‘Development Tools’. I didn’t have this problem on Rocky 8 after the group install of ‘Development Tools’, but I need to migrate to Rocky 9.
You said you installed Rocky Linux 9.4 and then proceeded to install that group. It is recommended that you run a dnf update -y and get to 9.5 and then verify that your issue is still present.
Rocky Linux 9.4 is no longer supported.
Understood. I’m using 9.4 because 9.5 has some kernel issues that impact RKE2 deployment so I have to manually downgrade the kernel if I use 9.5. But for dev desktops I’ll try 9.5.
A plausible explanation:
You did start with (initial) 9.4 packages installed. The group install pulls in 9.5 packages (unless you use install media’s repo) and might have updated some of the already installed packages. (One could check that with dnf history.)
If your “Server with GUI” set of packages has now a mix of 9.4 and 9.5 packages, then there can be incompatibilities as not all inter-dependencies are explicitly set in the packages.
The ideal would be to reproduce those issues on CentOS Stream 9 or RHEL 9.5 and report them to Red Hat. The “stable” in Enterprise Linux means that updates should not break systems.
However, rebuilds of third-party packages may be necessary after updates, with dependency on Qt libraries and kernel modules being most common examples. Therefore, it could be on “RKE2” to keep up with the RHEL (and hence Rocky).
E.g. start with 9.4 and then dnf up --exclude=kernel* (or something like that) to get everything but something into 9.5 (until that RKE2 can run with newer kernel).
Yes, that’s a good point, it’s hard to install the dev tools (as they were) on clean 9.4