Qubes stale boot - "Starting lightdm.service - Light Display Manager..."

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I have a Starbook laptop (Intel Core Ultra 7 165H processor) which is supposedly compatible with Qubes…

It comes pre-installed with Qubes out of the box, but it is not full-disk encrypted so I have reinstalled Qubes. After the re-install, I am unable to use Qubes as it hangs during the boot process.

The last few lines are:

[OK] Started cond.service - Command Scheduler.
Starting lightdm.service - Light Display Manager...
Starting plymouth-quit-wait.service - Hold until the boot process finishes up...

I have tried a few steps to solve this, including:

  • Reinstall Qubes
  • Adding qubes.skip_autostart to the kernel command line (Autostart Troubleshooting
  • Adding cpufreq=xen:hwp=off to the multiboot line (lightdm troubleshooting)
  • Adding systemd.unit=multi-user.target to the module2 line, which allows me to boot without LightDM and login successfully (no GUI)
  • Logging in manually and then editing the lightdm config to try and change the greeter

Could someone help me further troubleshoot? I’m not sure what else to try at this point. It seems strange that non-full-disk encrypted Qubes from Starlabs works great, while a fresh install with FDE does not.

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Which exact release version of the QubesOS image are you installing from?
Searching the Hardware compatibility list (HCL) for your CPU family (Meteor Lake) it looks like it should work with the stable kernel versions (after updating) but I don’t know about whatever kernel version comes with the ISO. Are you able to update dom0? Perhaps kernel-latest can help? Didn’t they include an option in the QubesOS installer to install kernel-latest from the ISO, or something like that? Those are just ideas. Others should be able to help better.

3

I was able to get it working today by adding nomodeset=0 to the module2 line in the Grub config. This allowed me to successfully boot the system and then update to the latest kernel.

Previously, I was using the default kernel that comes with the Qubes installer. Once I was able to boot successfully, I updated the Qubes kernel using sudo qubes-dom0-update kernel-lastest and it is booting correctly now.

I make an attempt to update the kernel using the installer drive, but that didn’t seem to work (possibly an older version of the kernel?).

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