Package: debian-live Severity: normal I think this will be helpful to anyone who wants to run a GUI in a live Stretch image in VirtualBox. None of my work-arounds seem to be specific to VirtualBox, so this may also be helpful to people using other (real or virtual) platforms.
I built a live Stretch image with task-kde-desktop, and booted it in VirtualBox. I expected to see a logged-in desktop environment, but instead I saw a screen asking for DEBIAN LIVE USER's password. Every 15 seconds, the VM's display window would change to a different resolution and immediately change back, losing any password keystrokes that I was typing while it was changing. When I entered the password I got a desktop environment, working as expected, except the resolution changes and keystroke loss continued to happen every 15 seconds. I determined that SDDM, which I don't think is supposed to run at all on a live system, was successfully running its own X server, while the autologin facility, which _is_ supposed be running an X server, was trying and failing to start an X server, repeating every 15 seconds. I was able to work around these problems by adding " xserver-xorg-legacy" to config/package-lists/my.list.chroot, and creating an executable file named config/hooks/live/no-sddm.hook.chroot containing these four lines: #!/bin/sh set -e echo disabling sddm systemctl disable sddm ###### Live System Information: ###### Name Version ===-=============================-=================== ii live-boot 1:20170112 ii live-config 5.20170112 ii live-tools 1:20151214+nmu1 Debian Release: 9.0 APT prefers testing APT policy: (500, 'testing') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) ###### Host System Information: ###### Name Version ===-=============================-=================== ii debootstrap 1.0.88 ii live-build 1:20170213 Debian Release: 9.0 APT prefers testing APT policy: (500, 'testing') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)