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:
- 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
- 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