Hi All,

I’ve installed Debian, using the gnome desktop, and have come up against a brick wall. Any action after logging-in returns me to the initial activities screen whereby I have to log-in again. Thinking that there could have been a problem with the install, I carried out a second clean install, with identical results. The desktop shows eight icons on the left side and something that appears to be a scroll bar on the right side ; a black bar appears along the top showing activities, time, and internet bars, speaker, power switch. There isn’t any sign of a mouse pointer although I’m able to use the mouse buttons to highlight the icons. I have no previous experience of Linux or Debian so don’t know what to expect. I have dabbled with the Windows command line in the past and am expecting a pretty sharp learning curve but to be stalled this early on does give me cause for concern.

I have an old Cybercom tower running a Pentium 4 processor which was given to me a long time ago, so I popped in a four sticks of ram I had lying about, giving me a total of 1 Gb, connected a clean 300Gb serial drive, and fitted a wireless card. I tested the system prior to installing Debian by installing Win7 ; everything worked fine. This is meant to be an experimental system to see if I can get on with Linux/Debian with plans to move on to another system in the future.

Although I was anticipating issues after migrating from Windows I wasn’t expecting to have them this early, so I would be grateful for any advice that might assist me in solving what I hope is a basic issue.

Regards.

Ian

P4, 32-bit, 1 Gb of RAM (did you mean GB - gigabytes perhaps?) and Gnome desktop with some old graphics card just don't mix. Probably the graphics is the weakest part here and causing Gnome to fail.

1 members found this post helpful.

I'm a tad confused by your post, on one hand you say you can't login, but on the one hand, it sounds like you are in fact able to login and do in fact see the desktop. My point is that, if you see the desktop with icons, then you have in fact been able to login to the system.

Based on the specs you describe, they seem quite low to be able to run something like GNOME smoothly. You might be better served with a more lightweight distribution, or at least a lightweight desktop environment rather than GNOME. I'm actually surprised GNOME even runs at all with those sorts of specs, to be honest. You might try using something like Xfce desktop environment or even a window manager instead if you want to use Debian. You could also opt for something like antiX or MX Linux instead if you don't mind trying a different distribution.

1 members found this post helpful.

Gnome requires 3D hardware acceleration. Do you know what graphics chip is in that old machine?

Thanks for your swift replies ; very helpful.

I will take a look at the incumbent graphics card and see if I have something to upgrade it with. I’ll do the same with the memory. It might be worth reinstalling with the lighter desktop environment to see if that works, prior to changing the distro.

I have to apologise for not being technically correct, I’m not really jargon oriented and as this was my first sortie into the forum I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’ll know for future reference.

For the record, I was able to log-on, it was any action after logging-on where the issues occurred.

Many thanks for your help.

Ian

on a old P4 box with 1 gig ram i would install " AntiX"
https://antixlinux.com/

i have that running just fine on an ancient ( year 2000) p4 with 1 gig ram and a gforce2 card

Could you post the result of the following command, in CODE tags (see my posting signature below if you're not sure how to use CODE tags):

?

No need to apologize for anything.

Hi Cynwulf,

I have just extracted the card and it turns out to be a state of the art, high end unit.

Nvidia D33008
128MB
Chipset P280
PCI Exp 16
Apparently appropriate for casual computing.

I bet your mouth is already watering.

Ian

It appears to be NV46 card, but being not a Gnome user I can't tell anything conclusive. I even don't know if Gnome is using Wayland or Xorg.

128 MB, that is surely not state of the art since todays video cards start at 2GB and up. It likely was good when that machine was new.

I can't find any reference to that card at nvidia. Would you please post the output of "lspci -nnk | grep -A3 VGA" as earlier requested.

I must be missing something. There is no way that I can see of inputting any code, due to the fact that any keyed input with a return, takes me out of the desktop environment back to the activities page, which will not accept any input. From there it reboots and returns to the log-on screen. Logging-in again just completes the loop. It is this problem that has given rise to my visiting the forum in the first place. I will attempt a change of card and perhaps add some additional ram. I will keep you posted.

Note to self. Irony and humour don’t necessarily translate in the written word, especially not in forums.

Ian

What about switching to a console, Ctrl+Alt+FX where X is some number, not 7. Get us the PCI ID, this is the hardware identifier.

Thanks Emerson,

I have tried all of the combinations of Ctrl+Alt+* but the only one that works is Ctrl+Alt+Del. I will do some card swapping and see what occurs.

What is slightly frustrating is that a number of books/articles that I’ve read suggest using an old computer to experiment with, which on the face of it seems like a sensible idea. There hasn’t been any suggestion that a high spec machine would be required to get it up and running. I’m just wondering if I should put a blank drive in my "working" computer and start from there. Perhaps later once other avenues have been explored.

John W makes a good suggestion for which I thank him. I might end up doing that but I am attracted to the "stable" aspect of Debian.

Thanks to all, speak later.

Ian

At last I can re-establish contact, having changed the graphics card, increased the RAM, and reinstalled Debian, It certainly appears that your diagnosis was correct as I am now able to access the console, although now the GUI doesn’t appear at all. Probably due to needing a driver ?

In an attempt to find the card I have input the command as suggested and the response is "command not found".

Progress at least. Without wishing to be a nuisance, would you be able to assist me with installing the appropriate driver ?

I have tried searching the forum but I think I’ll have to open up a new thread to ask for help with that as well.

Thanks. Ian

Rather than Greb use grep