community/sddm: fails to start greeter since 0.21.0-r3

Package Information

  • Package name: sddm
  • Package version: 0.21.0-r3
  • Alpine version: edge
  • Alpine architecture: loongarch64, aarch64, x86_64

Summary

I use sddm as my system display manager. Since upgrading to 0.21.0-r3, the greeter fails to start.

This is because the greeter is trying to use /dev/tty1 as the active VT for the greeter (see upstream issue 1844), which is already in use by a getty on most Alpine systems.

If I remove the getty in /etc/inittab, then sddm will start normally.

This is because sddm is running as the sddm user, which is unable to enumerate or take control of root-controlled VTs, but instead of trying with a new VT, it just falls back to SDDM_INITIAL_VT, which is hardcoded to 1 and fails to claim that VT.

I tried preparing an NMU to redefine SDDM_INITIAL_VT to 7 as a workaround, but this failed for other reasons, presumably because VT 7 is not actually initialized.

In addition, sddm prints warnings about various systemd interfaces being missing such as org.freedesktop.locale1. sddm should likely depend on openrc-settingsd for the meantime while we sort that out.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Install sddm
  2. Start the sddm service
  3. Observe sddm failing to start