Hello, I am very new to the world of Linux. After installing Arch Linux and the X Windows System I decided to try Plasma 5.

I thought everything went fine during installation of Plasma 5, but when I get stuck on the login screen when I boot up. The arrow buttons do not work, but I can change the session from "Plasma Media Center" to either "Plasma" or "Failsafe" and restart the computer.
It sort of looks like something is missing:

Any help is very appreciated!

Did you create any user (beyond root, sddm will not allow you to log in as root) after installation and/or did you de/activate it?

(Archlinux is *not* a "click,click,works" distro - you're supposed to know or learn the system and will have to perform many steps by hand that other distros do in their graphical installers)

Yes, I am aware of the nature of Arch Linux -- I'm here to learn.

I created a user account and changed the password (is that what you mean by activate?). Now I do see a user icon on the login screen, but after accepting my password it goes to a black screen with code for a second then jumps back to the login screen. There are a few [ DEPEND ] and a few [ TIME ], but they only pertain to my internet connection.

Either the X11 server or ksmserver crashed or the startkde script exited early.
Did you install proper drivers or are you running on VESA?

(Check lspci, eg. if you've an intel IGP, you'll need xf86-video-intel, which will implicitly install mesa. For an nvidia GPU, you'll either require one of the nvidia drivers - older GPUs are in legacy drivers - or xf86-video-nouveau; latter being not that stable)

Did you make the default settings for the sddm ?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SDDM:

On systems controlled by systemd, everything should work out of the box, since SDDM defaults to using systemd-logind for session management. The configuration file will therefore not be created at package installation time. SDDM offers a command for generating a sample configuration file with the default settings if you really want one:
# sddm --example-config > /etc/sddm.conf

At here, the default sddm settings are helping a lot.

'helping a lot' = the sddm is working - without the /etc/sddm.conf the sddm will show the Maui theme and won't log in.

@luebking
After installing the correct NVIDIA drivers and setting up the config I can control whether or not the NVIDIA logo is displayed during boot using the config, but I still have the same problem.

@Rog131
I'm pretty sure I did this initially, but I tried exactly what you said to no avail -- after logging in I am still pushed back to the login screen.

Thanks again for the help and effort!

Stupid question again: how did you create the user and did you pass him a (writable) home directory?

To create it, I typed in:

Code: Select all

useradd petey
passwd petey
myPassWord
myPassWord


ie. "no"

Code: Select all

mkdir /home/petey
chown petey:users /home/petey
chmod 755 /home/petey


you wanted to use "useradd -m petey"
You may also want to add your user to some groups ("wheel" and "video") and add some meta information ("chfn")

See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Users_and_groups for more information.

@luebking
Yes, that worked perfectly. Thank you!