Kills lightdm.service on install

[dratner]

I've been trying to install RaspAP on a Raspberry Pi 4B with a fresh install of Bookworm Lite 64-bit (I just created the image, enabled VNC, and update the default packages.)

As soon as I run the install script curl -sL https://install.raspap.com | bash and reboot, the Pi won't boot the Desktop and shows the following error:

[FAILED] Failed to start lightdm.service - Light Display Manager.
See 'systemctl status lightdm.service' for details.

When I go in to investigate, it shows:

dratner@thermopylae:~ $ sudo systemctl status lightdm.service
x lightdm.service - Light Display Manager
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/lightdm.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Mon 2024-01-15 16:47:41 CST; 4min 26s ago
       Docs: man:lightdm(1)
    Process: 932 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/lightdm (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
   Main PID: 932 (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
        CPU: 46ms

Jan 15 16:47:41 thermopylae systemd[1]: lightdm.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 5.
Jan 15 16:47:41 thermopylae systemd[1]: Stopped lightdm.service - Light Display Manager.
Jan 15 16:47:41 thermopylae systemd[1]: lightdm.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
Jan 15 16:47:41 thermopylae systemd[1]: lightdm.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Jan 15 16:47:41 thermopylae systemd[1]: Failed to start lightdm.service - Light Display Manager.
Jan 15 16:47:41 thermopylae systemd[1]: lightdm.service: Triggering OnFailure= dependencies.

I'm not sure what's causing it, but I did this twice with the same result.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Create a fresh image of Bookworm Lite 64-bit
2. Boot your Pi.
3. Enable VNC (not sure if this is necessary to reproduce.)
4. Run apt-get upgrade and apt-get update
5. Reboot.
6. Run RaspAP installer:
   sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get full-upgrade sudo reboot sudo raspi-config curl -sL https://install.raspap.com | bash sudo reboot

[dratner]

Note: this seems to be fixed by reinstalling raspberrypi-ui-mods: sudo apt-get install raspberrypi-ui-mods. But I'm not sure why the RaspAP installer removed that package to begin with.

[billz]

Hi Dan, the Desktop version of RPi OS is completely unsupported, here's a FAQ explaining why.

Good to know you found a workaround by installing the missing package. RaspAP's installer doesn't explicitly remove this—more likely it's related to a dependency as determined by apt (another reason we've chosen not to support Desktop distros).

That said, we've recently invested effort into RaspAP's Docker support. We haven't tested our Docker container with Desktop, but it could be an option for you in the future.