I wanted to try Arch and as I have an M1 Mac, I need to use the ARM version of arch or otherwise my Arch is slow as fuk because it's emulated.
I'm using UTM as my virtual machine (for those who don't know, UTM is just a nice GUI frontend for managing QEMU machines, so I'm technically running Arch in QEMU). I'm using the pre-configured installation from the UTM gallery: [url]https://mac.getutm.app/gallery/archlinux-arm[/url]
I wanted to try installing a desktop environment, so I started with installing SDDM (I'm not sure if it already comes with a desktop environment, but I'm happy if I just have a login screen).
Basically I just updated Pacman and then installed SDDM. Then I enabled the SDDM service.
Then I had to add a display to my VM, because the installation from the UTM gallery does not have a display output by default, but just a serial interface window to interact with Arch.
So in the settings of my VM, I added a display and the display card [code]virtio-ramfb[/code] was selected by default, so I kept it like this. When I'm now launching my VM, I have one window for the display and one for the serial interface. While you can see the system booting in the serial window, the graphical window just displays 4 Tuxes in a row for some time, and then just has a black screen, while the serial window is just showing a normal terminal login like before.
So, I checked [code]systemctl status sddm[/code] to see if it's actually running, and the output said that it was active and showed the last logs from this service:
[code]Aug 14 19:42:17 alarm sddm[462]: Failed to read display number from pipe
Aug 14 19:42:17 alarm sddm[462]: Display server stopping...
Aug 14 19:42:17 alarm sddm[462]: Attempt 2 starting the Display server on vt 2 >
Aug 14 19:42:19 alarm sddm[462]: Display server starting...
Aug 14 19:42:19 alarm sddm[462]: Writing cookie to "/run/sddm/xauth_DguHSX"
Aug 14 19:42:19 alarm sddm[462]: Running: /usr/bin/X -nolisten tcp -background >
Aug 14 19:42:19 alarm sddm[462]: Failed to read display number from pipe
Aug 14 19:42:19 alarm sddm[462]: Display server stopping...
Aug 14 19:42:19 alarm sddm[462]: Attempt 3 starting the Display server on vt 2 >
Aug 14 19:42:19 alarm sddm[462]: Could not start Display server on vt 2[/code]
I don't know where to find the full logs, but I think the important error message shows up here anyway:
[code]Failed to read display number from pipe[/code]
I searched for this error, and I found the suggestion to install the drivers required for my display. This would be [code]virtio-gpu[/code] for the display card selected in UTM, but pacman doesn't find any packages named [code]virtio-gpu[/code] or [code]virtio[/code].
I also read a few times that I'd have to re-generate the initramfs or whatever, I'd have to run [code]mkinitcpio -P[/code]. But this command always fails with this error message:
[code]gzip: stdout: No space left on device
bsdtar: Write error
bsdtar: Write error
==> ERROR: Initcpio image generation FAILED: 'bsdtar (step 1)' reported an error[/code]
Somehow gzip complains about not having space left on device, but increasing the size of the RAM as well as the hard drive in the VM settings didn't worked, so I'm not sure if it's really because of having no space left.
Restarting the SDDM service manually also didn't work. I tried it with [code]systemctl restart sddm[/code] as well as stopping and then starting it, and I also ran [code]systemctl disable sddm[/code] and started it manually after rebooting, but still just black screen.
But when starting the system with the SDDM service disabled, I found that the display window now shows the usual Arch terminal, so Arch at least somehow detected the display and is able to print something to the screen.
So I guess I might need to something for SDDM or so...
Do you know where this error comes from? (And do you also know why my initcpio generation fails?)
Thank you!
