XFCE login no longer works with 8.5

Rocky Linux General
1

I’ve just updated my Lenovo ThinkCentre to Rocky 8.5 and I can’t log in to an XFCE session. Classic and MATE both work. I type in my password in the GDM greeter and the screen blanks, but then the greeter come back. Any suggestions as to where to start looking? Thanks

Hmmm… today I couldn’t log in to a MATE session. Also, my Gnome Classic session is prompting for authentication for several things - changing my own user data, creating a colour profile, refreshing system repositories, creating a colour managed device. Looks like Polkit is screwed. Any relationship to my other login problems?

Okay… this is getting annoying! MATE login started working, and so did XFCE, but they’re both intermittent - sometimes I can, sometime’s I can’t. The Gnome Classic desktop uses the Wayland drivers, dunno about Xfce or MATE.

2

Got the same issue on Centos. I gave up and restored the image of 8.4.

3

Not a fix, but I found a workaround for this issue. Every time I manually select “Xfce” from the session ( the small gear icon) and then login. It works every time.

4

Have you tried lightdm instead of gdm? That solved the no-login problem with Mate on el8.

https://docs.rockylinux.org/guides/desktop/mate_installation/

5

Found a similar guide for XFCE and it helped.
https://docs.rockylinux.org/guides/desktop/xfce_installation/

And we have to disable GDM and enable LightDM to make it work. I have submitted a PR for that guide

6

Hi
I never could install lightdm. There is always the same dependance missing since the beginning of Centos 8. Do you work with Xorg ?

7

Yes, my XFCE install runs on Xorg

8

I clean installed from Rocky-8.5-x86_64-dvd1.iso and purely by chance found that same installation guide which I followed and got Xfce working straight away.

Then I switch back to gdm and tried again - same problem occurred again and I couldn’t log in. Switched back to lightdm and all was good once more.

It’s good to have this fixed, because if I leave gnome-classic logged in on the console then I can’t use gnome-classic on an xrdp remote desktop session! (some nonsense about dbus devices being inaccessible)

9

No idea what is causing issue for GDM, but if we select “xfce” (again) from the GDM session menu (the small gear icon) then login works :grinning: