I have a Dell Precision 5820 Tower with an Nvidia NVIDIA GP107GL [Quadro P400]
card (3 DisplayPorts) and two iiyama monitors in portrait mode. I run kernel
6.12.90+deb13.1-amd64.
For a long-forgotten reason, this machine boots into run level 3 (multi-user).
It was suffficient to type telinit 5 to get to the graphical interface.
When I installed Debian 13, the nouveau driver was not able to handle the two
monitors, so I worked with one only. Finally I got tired of this and loaded
nvidia-detect which told me that the meta package nvidia-driver would support
my
card.
So I installed nvidia-driver (66 packages including g++). I then rebooted into
run level 3 and saw the nvidia driver:
root@titan ~ inxi -v8 | grep -A2 Graphics:
Graphics:
Device-1: NVIDIA GP107GL [Quadro P400] driver: N/A alternate: nvidia
non-free: 550-570.xx+ status: current (as of 2025-04; EOL~2026-12-xx)
I typed telinit 5 and nothing happened - still in run level 3. I tried
systemctl
isolate graphical.target but nothing happened, I was still in run level 3.
Command systemctl get-default says "multi-user" so I ran systemctl set-default
graphical.target and rebooted.
Still in runlevel 3. so I tried to enable graphical.target and got:
root@titan ~ systemctl enable graphical.target
The unit files have no installation config (WantedBy=, RequiredBy=, UpheldBy=,
Also=, or Alias= settings in the [Install] section, and DefaultInstance= for
template units). This means they are not meant to be enabled or disabled using
systemctl.
Possible reasons for having these kinds of units are:
• A unit may be statically enabled by being symlinked from another unit's
.wants/, .requires/, or .upholds/ directory.
• A unit's purpose may be to act as a helper for some other unit which has
a requirement dependency on it.
• A unit may be started when needed via activation (socket, path, timer,
D-Bus, udev, scripted systemctl call, ...).
• In case of template units, the unit is meant to be enabled with some
instance name specified.
Here is /usr/lib/systemd/system/graphical.target :
[Unit]
Description=Graphical Interface
Documentation=man:systemd.special(7)
Requires=multi-user.target
Wants=display-manager.service
Conflicts=rescue.service rescue.target
After=multi-user.target rescue.service rescue.target display-manager.service
AllowIsolate=yes
Systemd's graphical.target is loaded and active :
root@titan ~ systemctl status graphical.target
● graphical.target - Graphical Interface
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/graphical.target; indirect;
preset: enabled)
Active: active since Thu 2026-06-18 10:55:44 CEST; 6h ago
Invocation: 5e9208bc4b264e78b56e3f2489e16903
Docs: man:systemd.special(7)
This output has colour code green. Does this mean that the graphical interface
is running somewhere, or merely available to run ?
Any suggestion or hint to get out of run level 3 would be very welcome, Roger
