Bug#922647: systemd --user no longer running

[Felipe Sateler]

On Wed, Mar 6, 2019 at 6:09 PM Julien Leproust <julien+bts at kwet.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I've been hit by seemingly the same bug on two of my machines.
>
> Since about mid-February, I noticed that my two Debian sid desktops no
> longer produced any sound. On one of them, I use lightdm+mate, on the
> other I use lightdm+kodi. Both were updated roughly weekly, with only
> official sid repositories.
>
> I quickly found out that the sound was broken because pulseaudio was not
> starting, having no permission to access the sound devices. In turn, I
> found that this permission should have been granted through dbus and
> systemd --user, which were both absent from the process list.
>
> Same symptoms for both machine:
> $ systemctl --user status
> Failed to read server status: Process org.freedesktop.systemd1 exited
> with status 1
>
> Last systemd user logs were from a boot mid-january when sound still
> worked. Absolutely no logs since then, just like for Eduard (I tried all
> the suggestions above).

So, #923881 gives one reason why systemd --user might fail. Is your
home directory set to a non-absolute path?

What could be helpful, is to provide the full journal from around the
time you login. There should be something there signalling why your
user instance is not starting.

ANother thing, easier to test, is to try to launch the user manager:
`systemctl start user@$UID` . Does that work?

-- 

Saludos,
Felipe Sateler