I ran into a problem this week, where I couldn't find a solution to.

I just installed last version of Debian and trying to boot into debian until it reaches "started Gnome Display Manager" where the Konsole gets stuck and the screen is going black every few seconds.

*GPU of amd

I would like for some help, thanks.

Get hold of another Linux distro and see if it does the same, IF it does then it could be some hardware issue(s).

Yea, I have tried few times to reinstall Debian, and got the same issue.
Now I just installed Fedora, and working fine.
Thanks anyway (:

A driver issue with Debian Gnome then. You can try Debian KDE and see if that works.

If you provide the ouput fromwe may be able to spot a reason for the Debian problem, making this thread more useful if you want to try Debian again, or from someone arriving here from a search hit. Alsoand providing here the links supplied could prove useful. Possibly your GPU is a bit too new for proper support in the Debian version(?) you tried but not for the Fedora version(?) you installed.

I am having the same problem. So I will post the results of the query to hopefully find the resolution for the machine I am installing and for any other people that may search for this later.

I am having the same problem. I installed Debian Buster - latest stable version - yesterday.

I installed from a USB flash drive that I had created from the latest stable amd64 iso image.

This is being installed on an older Acer laptop: model ZH6.

I did not try a "live" version of Debian first, but the machine will run a "live" version of ubuntu from USB.
Note that it is stopping after posting [OK] Started Gnome... so I think Gnome loaded? Is it whatever is next that is failing?

To diagnose the issue, I have rebooted Debian to recovery mode, command line.
I tried the commands suggested by MRMAZDA, inxi and fpaste but the system reports "command not found" for both commands. The command prompt reads root@debzzz:~# I'm not familiar with the ~#.
I tried using apt-get to install inxi but it wanted to read from a cdrom not the usb where the iso exists.

Should inxi exist already in recovery mode? Or is there another way to get the details needed to diagnose is the hardware is causing the failure to boot?

thanks!

Depends what version you're on - the inxi website claims to be pre-installed on Debian, but it's not automatically installed on my stable Buster 10.3. (It does appear to come pre-installed with bullseye/sid, but that's not yet the current release, so the website claim is misleading.)

There will be other commands that provide the same information, so if you can't either "sudo apt install inxi" or manually install inxi then you could try working out what those commands are (or wait for someone who knows to tell you; unfortunately I don't).

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Inxi is just an information gathering and formatting script. If it doesn't exist on whatever you booted, you can get its latest version from upstream.

Reply post #5 I made was in response to the OP having succeeded to install Fedora, so I gave him the Fedora command (fpaste) equivalent to the Debian command (pastebinit).

Do note that the inxi command cannot produce complete diagnostic data for troubleshooting X unless it is run from within an X session. Neither can anything else.

Some of the data that inxi -Gxx provides can be gathered with this command:

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Thank you for the direction. As expected lspci worked, but exposed another problem with the installation: incorrect keyboard mapping. This is one of those small format laptops with a non standard keyboard setup. The pipe key produces ">" and I could not find another key that produces a pipe. Obviously a significant problem for Linux command line activities. I suspect there is a way to adjust the keyboard mapping, but maybe I would be better off reinstalling to see if there is a better option at installation time.
This is really just a favor for a friend. He had this older mini-laptop, almost new, that he forgot his password to. Although I am very experienced in Windows, I prefer to install Linux as I feel it is a better architecture and works great for the simple things that most people do with their machines. I have been installing ubuntu, but ubuntu would freeze when launching the installation (although it would run fine from the usb drive).

So, since I see that you use many versions of Linux, should I retry installing Debian or switch to another distro?
By the way, when installing Debian I selected the graphical installation and the screens appeared normal. Also, I tried using the step by step instructions on the Debian site, but the hardware check URL was unresolvable.

thank you again

This smells like a Gnome problem specific to Buster. I have no direct experience with Gnome or GDM, so can't be of much help if that's where the problem lies.

It may be that you're running a Gnome session under Wayland, so the trouble might be avoided by running it as an Xorg session instead. You could try installing another DE and try it instead of Gnome at least as a test, instead of going to a whole different distro. IceWM is a very lightweight DE that I use for making such tests. My Debians are all running TDE. I also use TDE under Ubuntu, as well as KDE and IceWM.

If trying another distro either for testing purposes or to switch to, I would choose one that is neither Debian nor Ubuntu-based, such as Mageia, CentOS, Fedora or openSUSE, to avoid any issues that may be Buster- or Debian-specific. Choosing any desktop other than Gnome would be another option, whether in Buster or any other distro.

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You are probably right about the wayland issue. I took the following steps:
- rebuilt my installation usb drive. I am not sure this had anything to do with it, but the original way I created the usb drive was using "Universal-USB-Installer". I noted that the Debian instructions said to NOT use such tools, but rather to cp the iso to the base device. So I did that. Again - I am not sure this was of importance or not.
- Reinstalled Debian on the target machine in non-graphic mode. But this time when presented with the extra packages options, I Deselected the Debian Desktop Environment and ONLY selected LXDE. Previously, I had left the Debian Desktop Environment selected and then selected Gnome below that. I am not sure how the installation program interprets that Debian Desktop Environment: if it is selected, then is everything under it selected?
After this approach the machine would fully boot into the LXDE env.
But the "glidepad" did not work correctly. After some research I found that this can be caused by the lack of synaptics drivers under Wayland. But instead of installing the synaptics package (I tried and was told that resources were in use), I used and . This made the glidepad work, although it has to be redone after every boot (I know that can be fixed, but later).
Now the machine generally works, but after a screen lock, the video drivers appear to not reload properly - the colors switch to basic colors and the resolution is very coarse.

So I am not sure if I should try to fix these issues or try another distribution. I am learning new things and refreshing older long unused Linux skills (it's been 20+ years since I was an admin on Redhat/Apache in a corp). But it would be nice to get this resolved in a way that is usable for the non-computer person to whom this machine belongs.

Thank you.

Debian Buster here with Mate` and xorg, zero issues so concur with mrmazda that it is either a Gnome and/or a wayland issue. I am not on a laptop though so not sure if any other laptop oddities are in play, like dual video cards, etc.

I assume I can do away with wayland and install xorg. Do you know of a link to some instructions on how to do that?

As far as I know, it is installed by default unless it was removed. My Buster install is default using the Mate` DE and it is running xorg. In case xorg isn't installed, here is the Debian wiki link for it: https://wiki.debian.org/Xorg