[OpenIndiana-discuss] OpenIndiana live USB image does not start LightDM or X

[Till Wegmüller]

Hi Thom

Lovely to have you here on the list. While we sort out your x86 
installation. How is the SPARC journey going?

The most likely issue is always some sort of mismatch between graphics 
card and Drivers in the ISO. Intel only works in really old cards 
otherwise will need the vesa boot option for Software rendering. AMD 
does not work. For NVIDIA you need the right graphics card and driver 
combination. We try to include the one that will work best with most 
cards according to current info available. But we had issues in the past 
where our driver is so special we can't exactly relly on that information.

Anyway to get your installation working we usually have the following 
approach. First let's find a configuration we know has the best chance 
of working. That would be a x86 Workstation with NVIDIA graphics card. 
We know from the HCL a goos set that works without X 
https://illumos.org/hcl/

Then we try to get something that is close to a 1080 in generation from 
Nvidia. Important. No Laptops with discrete graphics. This does not work 
with our gfx gate.

Step 2 get the Workstation working without X and use it as pseudo server 
from a remote Terminal. That gets you productive with all the things 
then we can try to get X working and checking X11 logs to see what is 
failing with the card.

People here have some known good configurations which can be aquired 
from ebay and other sources. With current Prices these machines are my 
prefered workhorses at the moment anyway.

Hope that helps
Till


On 12/6/25 14:55, Thom Holwerda wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> 
> Over the past year or so, I've tried several Hipster live USB images on a wide variety of computers, but they all fail in the exact same way: graphical-login/lightdm fails when trying to boot the live USB image. Intel, NVIDIA, AMD - it doesn't matter what type of machine I try.
> 
> ***
> openindiana svc.startd[8]; application/graphical-login/lightdm: default failed: transitioned to maintenance (see 'svcs -xv' for details)
> ***
> 
> The log always shows the same thing: failed to get list of logind seats, followed by something about the name org.freedesktop.login1 not being provided by any service files.
> 
> I've tried starting X directly, but that just fails with no screens found. This exact same error flow happens on old and new hardware, regardless of brand of CPU or GPU, and on all the past few Hipster images. I've made sure downloaded images have the correct checksum, followed the exact image writing instructions from the handbook, used different USB sticks - and none of it makes a difference.
> 
> Any help that could point me into any direction would be greatly appreciated!
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> 
> Thom Holwerda
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