SUSE 15 Fails to boot into Desktop

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1

I’m having an issue with a SUSE 15 SP5 system that fails to boot to desktop.

Currently when booting it ends up on the terminal user prompt.

Restarting the display-manager service results in a black screen, checking its log shows many “GdmLocalDisplay: Sessions never registered”.

The Xorg log file at /var/lib/gdm/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log mentions a “could not open default font” fatal error. I’ve found a few mentions of this error online but mostly on very old posts that don’t seem related.

I have not yet attempted to update the system.

Any suggestions on how I should proceed from here?

2

@ruivieira Hi, what graphics card in the system /sbin/lspci -nnk | grep -EA3 "VGA|Display|3D"

3

I’m not sure, this is what the command outputs:

02:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Matrox Electronics Systems Ltd. MGA G200e [Pilot] ServerEngines (SEP1) [102b:0522] (rev 42)
        Subsystem: Fujitsu Technology Solutions Device [1734:1229]
        Kernel driver in use: mgag200
        Kernel modules: mgag200
4

@ruivieira Hi so the graphics driver is there. Is it set to start the graphical desktop?

systemctl get-default

If multi-user.target then as root user run systemctl isolate graphical.target && exit

5

The default is set to ‘graphical.target’. Running systemctl isolate graphical.target results in a black screen

6

@ruivieira So multi-user is the terminal login. So if you check the /var/log/xorg/Xorg.0.log what errors are reported?

7

Xorg reports a “Could not open default font” fatal error

8

@ruivieira I the xf86-video-mga package installed?

9

It is not, should I try installing it?

10

@ruivieira yes :smile:

11

Installing xf86-video-mga didn’t help, the issue remains unchanged.

I should mention that the system has worked correctly before and this issue popped up seemingly randomly.

12

@ruivieira Then is the a conf file for the device in /etc/X11/ or /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ directories?

13

Everything inside xorg.conf.d is commented out except for 00-keyboard.conf, other than that theres an /etc/X11/xorg.conf.install with the following content:

Section "Device"
  Identifier "modesetting"
  Driver  "modesetting"
  Option "PreferCloneMode" "true"
  Option "AccelMethod" "none"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
  Identifier "modesetting"
  Device "modesetting"
EndSection

Section "Device"
  Identifier "fbdev"
  Driver  "fbdev"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
  Identifier "fbdev"
  Device "fbdev"
EndSection

Section "Device"
  Identifier "vesa"
  Driver  "vesa"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
  Identifier "vesa"
  Device "vesa"
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
  Identifier "Layout"
  Screen  "modesetting"
  Screen  "fbdev"
  Screen  "vesa"
EndSection
14

@malcolmlewis thanks for the help.

Turns out it was some kind of corruption related to fonts, as for the cause it seems like the root filesystem was out of space at one point around the time the GUI stopped working.

Reinstalling xorg-x11-fonts, running fc-cache -f -v and fonts-config was enough to get the GUI to boot up correctly.

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