Testing ISO - Blac screen
 

I downloaded and tested the Testing version and both DVD and CD versions present me with a black screen when I try to install graphically. I can install without the graphical environment.
Can somebody else confirm this? I did "md5sum -c md5sum.txt" and everything is OK.

Download link http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/amd64/

I don't know Debian, but if you could tell us what the hardware is it might be helpful getting a good answer.

Since it is 'Testing' you can expect things to break.
That is what testing is for.. to find out what breaks.

It's not hardware related =) Trust me. Every other Debian ISO works. This could be just a little bug.

No. I expect more things to break at Unstable or experimental. But I don't need those images so I didn't bother to download them.

It might be driver related, so the hardware indeed matters.

Tested on VirtualBox, my machine and a friend's laptop. This last one being very new hardware.

I'm hoping other people can confirm this. Even the little CD image has this, so if someone has a good connection, please feel free to try it too.

I doubt many Debian testing users would ever notice that the graphical install option was not working. I, for instance, can't understand why anyone uses it.

As pointed out this is testing.

If you want to use testing as testing then you should be reporting this as a bug so the devs know about it. It is possible that it only affects your hardware. How are they supposed to fix it if you don't report it.

The installer has to evolve along with the rest of the new release. Falling behind can only make it harder to fix later.

If you want to install testing to simply use, I think you will find most folks use the Debian stable netinstall image (works reliably) using just the base install. Upgrade that install to testing or sid and then finish installing the OS.

I am sorry to burst your bubble but that installer is not the installer used for Debian stable. You have no idea what the cause is and hardware bugs are extremely frequent in any testing environment.

Could be very specific to your hardware even. Could be specific to any neccessary component.

You and I are not qualified to make this judgement. Only a properly filed bug will give the folks that actually know something of the installer for Jessie will get this analized.

Testing is NOT unstable and it is way more reliable to install from the Testing ISO, I tried many times upgrading from Stable and it's just a mess.

Again, I tested with 3 hardware specs, the last one being the newest. It happened in all of them.

I'm going to zero this drive and in the meantime search for the bugtracker.


What bubble? Did you really think I thought this installer was for the Stable release? I clearly stated that this is the testing ISO.

Bugs are extremely frequent in testing? You seem to know little about Debian. Ubuntu LTS is mostly based of Debian Testing, and it's very stable and rare to find broken things.

You are correct, testing is not unstable but it isn't stable either.

Do you think Ubuntu take Debian Testing and just slap their pictures into it?
No they do further patching..

If you are a 'serious' Tester then
http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting

remember you must provide specific details

is pretty much useless.

if you want to just use testing, install wheezy.. then

but you said yourself, the text based install works.. why do you need the graphical install?
I could understand if it was "stable" we were discussing, but no were are talking about _*testing*_ which is not stable...

Sorry I had to step out for a while... looks like this turned into a testing vs stable discussion while I was gone!

That was my thought. I mostly hang out in the Slackware forums and most of the "blank screen" posts I see there are related to kernel support for the latest hardware during install and boot, so I thought it might be helpful to know the hardware.

Being a Slacker I am accustomed to -current (i.e., testing) being nearly as stable as the latest release, but not sure about Debian so I'll stay clear of that discussion. ;)

You might want to tone down your bullshit a bit.
It's very clear you have little idea what you are talking about, and lecturing users with a lot more experience than yourself is unlikely to get you any useful help, now or in the future.

Well, in VirtualBox it 'falls over' when initialising the framebuffer

text mode works

You are familiar with Ubuntu, so therefore, you know more about Debian than Debian users do? Impeccable logic. And how rare are bugs in Ubuntu? I remember Buntu having quite a few annoying bugs when I used it.

That is probably the case, but breakage is also part of a testing system.

People, please keep this discussion civil.
To clarify some things:
- Debian Testing is currently not in a freeze, so the installers for Testing and Unstable are the same.
- Since the OP seems to have tested this on different hardware and in a VM this may indeed be a bug, so the proper way is to just report it.
- While Debian Testing is indeed pretty stable it is still a development branch and therefore can have bugs and/or instabilities, especially when it comes to the installer, that is naturally less tested than the rest of the OS.
- When opening a new thread it is a always a good idea to put in all information that might be necessary to help, even if you deem it at the moment to be superfluous. It may help to answer your question even if you don't think so. At this time we don't even know if you use the 32 or 64 bit version.

FWIW, I just tested the 64 bit netinstall ISO in Qemu and it works.

Junior, don't try to use Ubuntu's relationship with Debian to infer that Debian Testing is more stable than Unstable. Debian has strict a strict development structure and a bug can move through Unstable quite quickly yet be in Testing for anything up to 6 weeks. The fact Ubuntu uses Testing for its LTS releases doesn't mean alot except to say they let Debian do the vast majprity of bug fixing and then rush things through after that. Ubuntu 10.04 is the same as Debian Squeeze and Debian took another 12 months in Testing before it released it as Stable.

Back to your issue, it is highly likely, as others have said, that you have a bug. It is possible you have a regression (a similar thing happened in Ubuntu 10.04 due to a change in a kernel parameter yet the same kernel etc was used in Debian Squeeze without a problem becaues Debian took its time to fix it before release). The best thing you can do is keep testing but while you are doing this file a bug report.

Lastly, as others have said, please put either in your post or in your signature, the specs of the machine this issue is happening with. Without it people will be guessing what could be wrong while if you actually post it someone else with the same hardware may ahve already found out how to get things working properly and be able to post it quickly. In other words, help us to help you.

Problem solved - install using the ncurses installer...

Report the bug in the d-i - done. The testing .iso images often have a broken installer, the best option is to do a minimal stable install and just upgrade to testing but...
There are no unstable or experimental images.

testing outside the freeze is very close to unstable and in fact the idea that testing is more reliable than unstable is a myth. Even during the freeze testing can be buggy, because it takes a while for upstream fixes to get backported into the frozen versions. In such cases the solution is to install the package from unstable...

Your lack of success upgrading is due to your own inexperience it's not an accepted norm nor does it mirror anyone elses experiences so stating what you've said above as fact only exposes your own lack of knowledge on the subject - accept this and use this forum and it's members as a learning experience and you will make progress.

Yes, though he said "in any testing environment". Packages first get accepted into unstable from incoming. They migrate to testing automatically if they satisfy the requirements regarding release critical bugs. This means that bugs which are not found within a certain time frame can migrate into testing. It means that if there are not enough testers or people to report bugs, then bugs get into testing. Some bugs simply have to go into testing and some bugs simply have to get into the final stable release - and some bugs will not get fixed.

With many testing users there is a lot of "works for me" attitude. So you have lots of users who think it's a great desktop distro and everyone should be running it. I disagree. testing and unstable are only for advanced users. They're only for users who want to go the extra mile, do the extra work and accept and work around certain problems. People who expect and demand software to work and then cry on a forums when it doesn't should not be running testing. As they say "it's called testing for a reason". It's no good saying something like "it's called testing but it's supposed to be stable" and complain when something breaks. testing breaks - fact. Certain packages can just disappear from testing - fact.

testing may work for you if you're a fan of desktop/window manager A, have graphics chip B, motherboard chipset C and only use browser D. For someone else using different hardware/software - but still running debian testing - it may be a struggle, fighting with bugs and regressions or having to implement workarounds for various problems.

For the majority of users the best option is stable with backports. If hardware support is an issue, you need a newer kernel at most (available in backports). If newer software is the requirement - backports. If the software isn't in backports - learn to create your own backports. If that's too much work, then debian is probably not the best choice in the first place.
Irrelevant and a whole other debate not worth getting into...

Tried that. It messes up my install, all buttons look "oldish", I get blue selection like if I selected everything on the spaces to type passwords etc.

I don't plan to install Wheezy, it's too much of a pain.

Remember, I'm not a tester, I use this version (testing) because it's way easier to install what I want without conflicts. If I wanted to install Steam on Wheezy it would take hours, but on Jessie it takes 2 minutes =)

The text install works, so I don't bother trying to get the graphic one to work.

Weird because today I tested on 4 different machines and all of them were presented with the back screen. I noticed it must be a bug (and not driver related) when it didn't work on VBox.

It's hard to tone my BS down when people don't understand what I'm trying to say.
Would you wanna lecture me with your experience instead of attacking who's not attacking you? Totally uncalled for.

Yes. Thanks.

Not in LTS at least. It has almost no bugs at all. And, excuse me Debian user, I read a lot of things regarding testing versions of Debian and in most of them people say it will not break so easily, but when it does it might take a while to fix it. Point me one big break in Testing in the last year?

Finally a reasonable person in the middle of these egocentric ones who think they know more than everybody.

Thanks for clarifying that the installer is the same, and for realizing that Testing is not an unstable release.

I never said that Testing is more stable than unstable, stop making things up. What I tried to say is that Testing in Debian does NOT mean instability.

Yes, I will report a bug. I didn't have time to look for a bugtracker yet, but I will do til Sunday.

I will post my specs on the signature, don't worry. But at this point it's useless since I tested on 7 machines and all of them had the same issue. I thought it could be a DVD related issue but I verified 3 times the md5sum and even downloaded the ISO again.

@cynwulf: Unfortunately I don't have the time to reply your post today, but I'll answer a few things instead.

I didn't realize there aren't images for them although I might test if "current" (in their cdimage folder) is somewhat the Unstable image, but I think it isn't. What I meant is that it is possible to upgrade to them, and while fewer bugs might be present in Testing they might take longer to be fixed than if they're on Unstable.

Yes, that's correct.

My lack of success upgrading can't be due to my own inexperience since I followed an official debian wiki page. It must be related to the system, and not to my experience (or the lack of it) since the system was freshly installed.

The best option for you is a distro like linux mint or one of the 'buntus.

Hi.

No, they are not an option. Debian is my love since 2006 and it's forks usually don't have good installer like Debian. I tried Ubuntu's alternate installer and it, for some reason, doesn't offer me with possibility to chose "Twofish-xts-plain64" for encryption, but only offers me "Twofish-cbc-plain" IIRC.

The only (unimportant) issue with Debian is this minor bug in the installer which didn't affect me at all. I just wanted to know if this problem was only with me, but the discussion took a very different (and uneducated) path.

Thank you for your decent reply.

or Slackware... no graphical installer that can be broken.

Really? I know this is offtopic but is Slackware more difficult to install-learn-maintain than Arch? I didn't get to know Slack yet.

install no ( as long as you know how to partition )
maintain, no not really
configure to your liking .. well that is the learning curve

generally harder to install new packages in comparison to debian, ubuntu/mint and derivatives.
But you do get a nice fast system, might be a bit rough round the edges, but if you wanted you could fix that.

To be honest I never used Arch


If you are up for a challenge, look at Linuxfromscratch
you will need some linux basics, but going through the LFS books you will learn how a Linux system fits together
You will want to hold onto a 'Mainstream' distro for a while
LFS is time consuming, I've spent up to two weeks getting it to where I needed it, Debian a few hours if that.

Thanks for clarifying that. I'll test it out sometime on a VM =)

Slack or LFS?

LFS might be a pain to do in a VM

Slack. But only after I figure out how to install Arch =) It has been in my plans for months but I didn't have the time to learn it.

Slack is easier to install, and easier to maintain, than Arch.

You didn't get "uneducated" replies. In fact making such comments is not a way to endear yourself to the denizens of this site (you know... the people you are asking for advice)...

In fact, I invite you to try your approach at the Debian Forums and see what comes of it...

Debian is a distro for those who want to roll up their sleeves and get dirty. If that's not you, then Debian is not for you - that's why I suggested those other distros.

testing is for testing, it's really that simple. And if testing breaks, as with unstable, believe it or not you have no right to complain.

The testing installer .iso images have always had issues for as long as I can remember, not just with the graphical front end, but sometimes the installer itself is just broken (it often depends on which week you downloaded an image). This is why people suggested (quite rightly) that you install from the stable installer. You shot this advice down, immediately, with the implication that, if you can't do it, it must be impossible or not a good method. In fact installing from the stable installer and then upgrading is the best method of getting to either testing or unstable.

In your case the ncurses front end was working so this is just a none issue. As I said in my first reply, report the bug or use an alternative method.