Bug#785782: False sighting (will re-close) - problem was actually an invisible primary display

Tim Day timday at gmail.com
Wed Sep 27 12:06:18 UTC 2017


OK it turned out the gmd3 login prompt dialog wasn't actually absent... the
issue was due to my install actually thinking the machine had two heads,
when it didn't (7700K i7; CPU's integrated graphics on an Asrock H270 Pro4
mobo, one monitor attached to VGA port... but the freshly installed system
seemed to think there was a monitor on one on the other ports too).  The
dialog was presumably on the invisible-to-me display.  On closer inspection
I could slide the mouse off the left hand side of the screen I could see.
I think lightdm appeared to work better as it has he login dialog follow
the mouse from screen to screen (maybe gdm3 would be improved by such
behaviour; couldn't see anything in its config to select anything like that
though).

Anyway, the two screens issue became apparent when I looked closer at the
desktop lightdm was logging me into and I was obviously looking at the
secondary screen of a primary+secondary pair.  Reconfiguring displays
(usual right click on desktop) to be just a single primary on the desktop I
do have worked good.

The trick was then to copy the logged in user's .config/monitors.xml over
to where gdm3 could use it:

sudo cp .config/monitors.xml /var/lib/gdm3/.config/
sudo chown Debian-gdm:Debian-gdm /var/lib/gdm3/.config/monitors.xml

And after a dpkg-reconfigure gdm3 and selecting it as the login manager,
and a system restart, I'm seeing the expected gdm3 login prompt.  Phew!

(Makes me wonder if the Thinkpad I also ran into this on had the same
problem.)

Will send a separate control email to re-close this issue.
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