Spotify - Blank Screen
 

I have installed Spotify (client) and required deps from SBo (15.0). When I start the program I get a long delay then a blank screen - nothing displayed.

Running from the command line gives:

<15 second pause, then blank screen appears>

This is happening on 2 computers: A desktop (AMD graphics) and a System76 laptop (Hybrid graphics). Both running 15.0 and updated.

The laptop shows this additional message on the command line (but not in the log):

Although, again, the program fails to display on either computer. I've played with the graphics settings on the laptop (integrated, nvidia, hybrid, etc.) and no change.

Is anyone else seeing similar? Or perhaps I have something installed that is conflicting?

TIA

EDIT: The web client works fine, but I need the app to download for offline playing.

You forgot the dependencies:

libayatana-appindicator (ayatana-ido, libayatana-indicator), libcurl-gnutls

Negative. As I mentioned in the OP, the deps were installed.

This part...
I've also seen this in the past, sorted with:

Creating /etc/sysctl.conf
into that file (create it if it doesn't exist) I added:
dev.i915.perf_stream_paranoid=0

After that I ran:
sysctl -p

In my case I restarted the laptop for testing, not sure if I actually had to...

The one from SBo
Which version ?

Hmm. No joy here. I did exactly as above (including the reboot) and both the MESA message and black screen remain. Thanks though.

I'm assuming that's the correct package with those dependencies. Thanks.

That's a bit odd...

The only other thing I can think of, is the order dependencies were built...

libcurl-gnutls
ayatana-ido
libayatana-indicator
libayatana-appindicator
spotify

Of course, with each package installed once built. In same order...

googling suggests that others have solved the black screen issue by deleting the <user>/.cache/spotify/Browser/GPUCache folder (or the whole <user>/.cache/spotify folder) and then restart spotify.

Yes, I saw the same and tried it. Funny thing is this is on two different computers with two different hardware and software profiles - They both have 15.0 on them, but the laptop is a bit more 'specialized' so it has less external software on it. For me to see this on two such different setups has to mean some setting somewhere that I'm missing.

Maybe when I have a couple of hours I'll try a clean VM and see what happens.

Thanks.

Okay, so the VM managed to narrow it down for me. The issue is with polkit and my i3 WM. I run i3 on both my laptop and my desktop. So that answers that (to me) mystery.

When I installed spotify in a clean VM running stock XFCE, it started with a dialog asking for authentication. That does NOT appear with i3 and the app never opens.

Oddly enough, someone had a similar issue in this thread and I provided what was for me at the time, a working solution. Apparently it did not work for that thread OP and now it does not work for me.

I have lxsession and lxappearance installed and lxpolkit started via the i3 config. Internet searches seem to indicate this should be the solution.

If anyone has any ideas on where to go from here, I'd very much appreciate it.

Another bit of oddness...Doing some additional troubleshooting and it turns out I'm seeing *some* authentication dialogs - I use neomutt and after a reboot I was asked for a GPG passphrase via dialog before neomutt would start (linked to a webmail account). Is there a way to tell what program provides *that* dialog?

I'm having a similar experience, but I am running -current multilib, and I'm also running i3.
The last version of spotify that works for me (and that I'm using) is spotify-1.2.9.743.

I never thought it could be related to i3 (I also have a bit of mess with the latest python upgrades), but after reading your post I installed the latest spotify version on SBo (spotify-1.2.31.1205) and tested in both i3 and xfce4.

For what it's worth, here's the output of spotify from i3:
And here's the output from xfce4 (where it runs perfectly):
So the difference in my case seems to be:
Thank you for your post, now I know that the latest spotify works for me if I'm not running i3-4.23 (and the previous version).
Unfortunately I'll have to downgrade back to spotify-1.2.9.743 because I like i3 ;-)
Hopefully you'll get this solved, thanks again.

That did it! Thanks. The i3 session was not starting dbus. I should have remembered that from the thread I linked above where I responded previously. The answer was right there.

I copied /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.i3 to ~/.xinitrc and commented out the 'if' statement that launched i3. Replaced it with the last line:

spotify starts properly now. Marked solved.

Now the question is: Why doesn't the same thing work for .xsession and runlevel 4 (using SDDM)?