LightDM shows a black screen in my Arch Guest VM

Question

I'm trying to get LightDM to work but for some reason it just shows up a black screen when I get to the user selection screen, GDM works fine though.

I followed the ArchWiki doc and it's strange since it didn't involve any complex configuration:

1. Installed lightdm from yaourt (no errors)
2. On /etc/inittap changed d:3:initdefault: to d:5:initdefault: and x:5:respawn:/usr/sbin/gdm -nodaemon to x:5:respawn:/usr/sbin/lightdm >& /dev/null

Not sure if it's something related to virtualbox or the actual install.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

>&/dev/null is bash syntax. If you have ash and not bash as /bin/sh (I don't know which is the default on Arch), you need to write it the portable way: >/dev/null 2>/dev/null or 2>&1 >/dev/null.

Check the system logs (ls -ltr /var/log, look at the recently modified files after you modify /etc/inittab). I might have guessed the problem wrong; the logs are likely to have enough information to find what's really going wrong.