Debian 10, stuck in boot after starting gnome display manager ..

jjjzzz · 03-12-2020, 01:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mrmazda

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.

I gave up on trying to make debian buster work with the hardware. Installed Fedora 31 workstation and it works very well.

Thanks all

buck10 · 03-31-2020, 01:24 PM

I stumbled across this thread while trying to debug my first Debian install (Buster 10.3 with Gnome) on an older Lenovo laptop. I had no problems with the install until a I booted for the first time and got to the GNOME Display Manager message at which point nothing further happened. Switching to another console and then back (ctrl-alt-f2 then ctrl-alt-f1) got the window manager to display, but on a reboot the display manager would not show the login screen again,

So as suggested, I took a look at the contents of /var/log/Xorg.0.log and then verified what VGA controller I had using

Code:

lscpi | grep VGA

This told me I had an AMD GPU but that the Xorg.0.log file indicated that it couldn't find the driver for the particular graphics controller I had. Searching Debian's site, I found that firmware-amd-graphics had support for my card but was not currently installed on my system. So I installed that via

Code:

sudo apt install firmware-amd-graphicis

I then rebooted and all is working properly now.

While I can't be 100% certain that what I was experiencing was the same problem as seen by the OP, I suspect they are likely the same. So hopefully this post helps someone in the future with a similar issue.

wmromine · 11-26-2020, 06:48 PM

I had a similar issue. In my case, I had a high end graphics card installed, which provided an hdmi output to my monitor. The problem is the Debian Buster installation does not load any proprietary firmware, which is needed for the graphics card. My computer had a built-in VGA output, so I used that for the initial boot. Next, I installed the non-free firmware, which included support for my graphics card. Then, I switched back to my graphics card. If you install Debian Buster using the Expert mode, there is probably an option to provide an applicable graphics driver during the install.