Bug#851120: gdm3: does not start after fresh stretch install

[Andreas Henriksson]

Control: reassign -1 xserver-xorg-video-all
Control: retitle -1 gdm3 does not start on fresh stretch install in vbox

Hello Daniel Pocock,

Thanks for your bug report.

On Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 08:53:19AM +0100, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> Package: gdm3
> 
> Version: 3.22.1-1
> 
> Severity: serious

(Please note that you fubared the pseudo header so only Package was
considered.)

> 
> 
> I installed stretch using the 2017-01-12 netinst installer ISO (in a
> VirtualBox VM) and then I installed gnome with
> 
> 
>   apt-get install gnome
> 
> 
> The desktop fails to appear, the console just flickers continuously.

That means you don't have a working graphics stack and gdm can't
start (and keeps failing when it gets restarted after crashing).

> 
> I logged in over ssh and tried various things.  Eventually I tried
> 
> 
>    apt-get install xserver-xorg-legacy
> 
> 
> and now it runs and I see the GNOME login screen.

The xserver-xorg-legacy is definitely not a dependency of gdm3.
(I don't have it installed on my system for example.)
Reading the package description makes me think you're using some
legacy X driver which needs to depend on this package itself.

Could you please provide the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file from your
system so Debian X maintainers can see which driver you're actually
using?

Please also note that gdm itself uses wayland by default, so if it's
falling back on Xorg you likely have a system which has non-functional
KMS (Kernel Mode Setting). This is likely something you want to have
fixed for the future.

> 
> The same problem/solution was observed by another user in this discussion:
> 
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=801749#25
> 
> although that bug report appears to be discussing various gdm3 startup
> issues so I'm opening this new bug report to focus on this specific issue.

Since I'm not sure exactly which package is missing the dependency
I'm reassigning it to the meta-package for now. Hopefully once
you've provided the X log, the X maintainers can reassign it to the
proper package. Possibly it might not even be up to any x driver, but
maybe it's just related to using virtualbox. Since vbox guest
addons isn't installed by default that's problematic but maybe
it's those that needs to have a dependency on xserver-xorg-legacy.

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson