On 2023-05-19 23:32, Gary Dale wrote:
I'm running Debian/Bookworm on an ASUS FA506IC laptop. It's got an AMD
Ryzen processor but an NVidia graphics card that provides me with
great evidence for why I had previously avoided NVidia cards. I'm
running Bookworm because I couldn't get it work on Bullseye.
It'd been running OK with the proprietary drivers (but not the
Nouveau) until earlier today. I don't use it very often so it was
probably a few weeks since I last updated it. I had trouble the
previous time I'd updated it too, but that was the move to the
non-free-firmware section that messed it up. Once I added the new
section to the sources, things worked again.
The symptoms I'm getting are the same as what it used to display when
I tried to use sddm to start the desktop. Gdm3 and lightdm both worked
in the past but now I'm getting the same symptom with all of them - a
blank screen with a cursor flashing in the top-left corner. At that
point I can't even bring up a text console, but I can reboot
(ctrl-alt-del still works).
I can boot to a recovery mode and start the network, but not sure how
to track this down. Removing and reinstalling the NVidia driver didn't
help. Trying to start the desktop without the NVidia driver (and
firmware) installed also didn't work. I still get the system booting
to a blank screen with a flashing cursor in the top let corner.
Any ideas?
Thanks.
I got some time this afternoon to play around with the system. My first
effort was to go back to Debian/Bullseye (11.7) and do a fresh install.
Surprisingly, it worked this time. I could boot into Gnome without
problems. However I had no wifi. Changing to sddm however led to failure
to reach a login screen. Installing lightdm let me select Plasma 5
however. This is all with the Nouveau drivers.
However the wifi issue needed to be resolved. It turns out there are
working (non-free) drivers available but they require a more recent
kernel. I added bullseye-backports and installed the newer kernel and
firmware-misc-non-free. This led to a failure to reach a login screen
(in fact, the boot appears to hang after producing about 4 lines of
output but booting to recovery mode let me see that it failed loading
the Nouveau drivers).
Installing the nvidia-driver allowed the system to reach a graphical
login but the system was not very stable. The difference in kernel
versions was giving me a lot of errors so I tried to upgrade completely
to Bookworm. That got me back to the point I was at when I first posted
my original problem. I couldn't get to a working graphical login.
This led me back to the Debian site to download the latest Bookworm
installer. The RC3 netinst is problematic - it didn't recognize my /home
partition as formatted and ended up wiping it out. And when I rebooted
into the installed system, it left me at a grub prompt. But when I
rebooted and selected the boot partition manually through the BIOS, I
was able to boot into the system. I ran update-grub and it's now booting
properly.
Surprisingly, I was even able to switch to sddm and get into Plasma 5
(Wayland!), all while using the Nouveau drivers. And wifi just worked!
