Ubuntu 24.04, sddm blues

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1

Hello,

2 days ago I updated my Ubuntu 20.04 to 24.04. Plasma desktop removed the rolling cubes (to be returned in the future) and I seem to have problems with sddm.
I installed a theme, in the default path, /usr/share/sddm/themes, and sddm can’t find it.
This is an excerpt from the logs from running sddm in --test-mode:

Blockquote
[02:16:11.554] (II) DAEMON: Display server starting…
[02:16:11.554] (II) DAEMON: Writing cookie to “/home/nikos/xauth_NBuTGf”
[02:16:11.554] (II) DAEMON: Running: /usr/bin/Xephyr -br -screen 800x600 -auth /home/nikos/xauth_NBuTGf -noreset -displayfd 116
[02:16:11.655] (II) DAEMON: Writing cookie to “/home/nikos/xauth_NBuTGf”
[02:16:11.655] (WW) DAEMON: Failed to change owner of the auth file.
[02:16:11.656] (II) DAEMON: Setting default cursor
[02:16:11.662] (II) DAEMON: Running display setup script “/usr/share/sddm/scripts/Xsetup”
[02:16:11.705] (II) DAEMON: Display server started.
[02:16:11.705] (II) DAEMON: Socket server starting…
[02:16:11.705] (II) DAEMON: Socket server started.
[02:16:11.705] (WW) DAEMON: The configured theme “Sonomatic” doesn’t exist, using the embedded theme instead
Blockquote

I see 2 issues here:

  1. Permission issue. Not really an issue, cookie is written by sddm that I run in test mode,
    so it is created as nikos:nikos as it should. But in real mode it would run as root and be able to change it to wherever it wants to.

Blockquote
-rw------- 1 nikos nikos 95 Apr 21 02:16 xauth_NBuTGf
Blockquote

  1. This is the main issue. It cannot find the requested theme in the default path:

Blockquote
ls -la /usr/share/sddm/themes/
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Apr 21 01:05 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Apr 21 01:41 …
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Apr 21 01:05 maya
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Apr 21 00:43 Sonomatic
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 35 Apr 21 01:05 ubuntu-theme → /etc/alternatives/sddm-ubuntu-theme
Blockquote

I have looked around in the web for sddm issues, but the only problems I found out are of
plasma-6.0 users trying to use plasma 5.x themes. I use plasma 5.27.
Right now the default sddm theme is unusuable. Not only boring, but also it features a huge
virtual keyboard that hides all the available users. I had no sddm problems in ubuntu 20.04.

TIA
Nikos

2

You did not, you copied the content of the 24.04 live session manually over the the content of your installed OS on the internal disk, this is not any kind of update and is expected to be completely broken and unusable.

As I told you in the original thread, please do a fresh install using the installer on the live media, you broke your original install beyond repair, trying to fix this mess will only waste everyone’s time…

3

“You did not, you copied the content of the 24.04 live session manually over the the content of your installed OS on the internal disk”

I certainly did not do that. After getting a broken installation, I opted for a new clean install with formatting…
So this is a clean installation with SDDM problems:(

4

If it’s really a “clean install,” then why did you say that it’s “updated” when you started this topic?

How confusing. Which is correct? Why did you mention the other?

5

So have you installed Ubuntu or Kubuntu? Installation process is of course the same, because they are both Ubuntu.

But have you first installed Ubuntu and then installed Kubuntu packages to it to make it Kubuntu? Because if you have, that is not advisable. It is always much more safer to install desktop-environment without hassling with another, because that can cause problems.

I can say from personal experience that this is the way to gain some gray hairs.

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