Hi everyone,

I've had this ongoing issue for the past 6 to 8 months and it occurred during one of the MX upgrades (I just don't remember which one it was). My system is always current and that was the case back then too.

Anyway, if I log off as a user on my system, the lightdm screen (selected picture) displays as it should.

But when I boot up or restart the machine, the selected picture for lightdm just shows a blank screen. There's a brief period of apx. 5 - 8 seconds during the boot process where I always had a picture displayed in the past, so I know that it used to work.

I've reinstalled lightdm and all relevant (to my limited knowledge) packages, but nothing has made a difference. I figured that it was a bug or a glitch that would be corrected eventually, but it's been at least 6 months now and there's been plenty of updates and one MX upgrade during that time.
Any thoughts or ideas on this?

Thank you.

Are you sure it is lightdm's turn to provide the background at that stage?
If yes:

• does the background configured for lightdm exist and display normally (in, say, an image viewer)?
• lightdm logs what it does, either to its own log or to the systemd journal.

Share the results of your research.

Thanks for the reply.
Yes, the background exists right in the user root and it works just fine with an image viewer. As stated, when I log out of the session ... which then presumably has me sitting in the lightdm greeter ... the image works fine as well. Jut not during boots or restarts.

I may have to reinstall the system anyway since I just screwed the login session up. I installed the SDDM greeter to see if that would work as expected, and it did. But I didn't like it so I uninstalled it again. Well, apaprently by uninstalling SDDM I also inadvertently messed up the previous lightdm greeter/session. So now I can't even log into the system anymore.

Right now I'm in a live boot, just looking at the folders & files of the user that I can't log into anymore. The live XFCE session works just fine ....

So, is that the same file that lightdm's config file points to?
And what you presume is lightdm, when you reboot, is that really lightdm (the final login window before you get to your desktop) or something else?

Also don't underestimate the importance of looking at logs.

Well, it has to be lightdm because it's always been the default for MX/XFCE and I've never changed that until today. And it always worked for about 2 - 3 years without a problem, until it suddenly stopped displying the picture for the login. As far as the config file is concerned, I wouldn't know where too find it in order to look at it.

Right now I can view all of the files from the live session, but using the terminal is a bit cumbersome.

I reinstalled the system exactly as it was before. So now everything is exactly as I described it in the beginning of this thread, with lightdm not displaying an image during cold starts and reboots. Lightdm works fine otherwise, i.e. when you log off. Only then does the picture show up as accepted. Can someone please point me in the right direction for the lightdm config file? I'd like to take a look at that ....

Problem solution can be found here:

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtop...38824#p2138824

Problem had to do with the fact that I was using auto-login without a password.
Setting the auto-user-login from 0 to 1 second did the trick.

Thanks for the help ...

Open timeshift and go back a day or three.
You do have Timeshift ?

Thanks, but I already posted the solution ... which indeed had to do with Lightdm settings.
No, I don't use Timeshift. Have no use for it and didn't need an application like that since I stopped using Windoze.

Famous last words

Well, it's all about habits, I suppose.

My wife and I have been using computers professionally for over 30 years. So we've always been in the habit of keeping backups upon backups on a regular basis. And since we use our own customized images for new installation purposes ... which only takes about 10 minutes to install ... there's really no need for Timeshift. The only time that we've ever lost data was about 15 years ago when a SCSI drive bit the dust before I had a chance to replace it. So we started renewing all of our hardware apx. every 3 years. Since then there have been no more hardware issues either.
But yeah, I can see the importance of Timeshift for many users. It's just not for us.

Without backups? Colour me skeptical.

Did you miss this part in the first line:
"So we've always been in the habit of keeping backups upon backups on a regular basis."

We keep so many backups that we have to filter out and delete backups ... also on a regular basis.

Good for you. Backups are important.