Re: [tlug] Hung Startup

[CL <cr.lipton@example.com>]

I wanted to thank everyone who took the time to reply.  The actual 
message was posted late as it came to TLUG's servers from another mail 
account despite being created on my TLUG member account.  I think that 
there must be a crossed wire somewhere in Thunderbird, which has gotten 
nothing but updates for over 20 years.  My TLUG member account lives 
there with several other versions of myself, including my Tokyo PC Users 
Group account that hasn't had a hit since about 2007.

I'm going to try to respond to everything once.

During the intervening time, I heard back from a Customer Service rep at 
ASUS Taiwan, who suggested that their native video drivers for Debian 
were found by early adopters to work much better on a 'Buntu variant 
than a pure Debian one and that , unlike an install of the drivers in 
Debian, which requires manually editing a couple of conf files, 
installation on 'Buntu variants was simply download, install, and 
reboot.  He suggested that I consider concentrating on getting right 
with 'Buntu + the desktop of my choice than continuing to get beat up by 
Debian.  So, I returned to Lubuntu and found that I was still having 
problems with the OS remembering basic configuration and was not able to 
initiate sync in Firefox.  As Jim noted, you can uninstall the snap 
version of Firefox and switch over to a PPA version.  When I did so, 
nearly all of my problems disappeared and I had my saved Firefox 
configuration back and running in less than two minutes.  The upside was 
that a lot of other performance and configuration issues also stopped 
immediately.  The CPU+GPU Radeon combination produces the most clear 
graphic output I have ever seen and I will play with the tweak 
instructions ASUS sent me later this week.  There is still an issue with 
fan controllers on the video card, which is a "known problem" and it 
appears as though installing the one patch mentioned in the online help 
will require me to brush up on my Python.

So, after, maybe, two hours of work I am where I thought I would have 
been ten days ago.  Couple of things to note:

- Installing ASUS's drivers and firmware on Debian LXQt and running 
tests with xrandr produced almost constant failure to find and set gamma 
on my particular video monitor / video card combination and it kept 
trying to set the refresh rate to nearly double the known required level 
(137.5 vs 60Hz).  Running the same confirmation tests on Lubuntu yielded 
expected results immediately.

- I tried several different Debian installs -- no-desktop, XFCE, LXDE, 
LXQt, KDE.  None recognized my video as 1920x1080 and all required 
extensive manual reconfiguration to start and run reliably.  When you're 
four hours in and the Internet instructions say there are "just" 26 
simple steps left, you question your motives.  In most cases, I had to 
do a full install because the Live CDs were hanging with "st5100-tco 
Watchman not working" (sic) errors that stopped the loading.  All-in-all 
the Debian installation sets seem to be not ready for Prime Time for 
someone interested in installing, configuring, and forgetting.  Also, 
the selection of supporting software, particularly Bluetooth, audio and 
video players, and office support programs all look like stuff scraped 
out of the back of closets or left over school programming projects.  I 
guess that mainstream supporting programs is another big "other reason" 
why I went back to a 'Buntu in the end.

-  As Steve notes, the workaround for the CUPS hang is Ctrl+Alt+F3, 
login, then type "startx" to get in.  But, once in, I was never able to 
pin down the cause of the CUPS hang as it appeared to be a failed 
dependency issue I was unable to isolate.  I hadn't considered 
uninstalling CUPS but, after reading through the startup log it seemed 
as though messing with it would be kicking out the third leg of the 
stool and everything would fall down.  I might have been exaggerating 
that given the number of tries and fails I'd already faced.  As for the 
dead keyboard I mentioned -- neither the USB or wireless keyboard (I had 
both running) would work.

-  Finally, I beg to differ with Steve's assertion that all install 
media are the same except for the desktop.  I quickly learned that the 
installation wrappers used by the installation disk creation teams of 
the different Debian flavors are not all the same.  There is one 
particular wrapper universally used by all 'Buntu versions as all of 
them now automatically offer UEFI disk partitioning.  But, the same 
wrapper is only available in a couple of the Debian variants and I 
counted at least four variations.  Finally, the Debian graphical 
installer continues to hang on all of my systems, as it has for many 
years, at the "configure connection" and, I think the cause is the 
missing rtl hardware driver which always needs to be installed manually. 
Installing from a "+ firmware" disk set finally got me around that issue.

-  Oh, and Mint?  No thank you.  I was an early adopter back when they 
wanted you to re-format your HDD for every "upgrade" and that meant 
saving to a separate disk or saving all of your work and putting it 
back.  I left and never went back.

On 8/29/22 17:25, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> CL writes:
>
>   > I have successfully done several installations of Debian Bullseye, using
>   > a Debian+Firmware iso to get the RealTek driver installed
>   > automatically.  I have tried installing the LXQT desktop,
>
> The desktop is going to be irrelevant to everything except the splash
> screen.  Changing desktop is not going to
>
>   > This occurs before keyboard and mouse drivers are mounted so reset
>   > options are limited to the large friendly button on the box.
>
> I doubt that's correct.  There may be no mouse driver, but there's
> always a keyboard driver in the kernel.  So I suspect that you're
> actually seeing a kernel panic.  Once you get access you should be
> able to check the logs to find out more about what happened.
>
> You should be able to escape from the GUI bootup by hitting a function
> key (maybe F2 but I'm not in a position to check) within a second or
> two of the boot sequence starting (this is not for the BIOS, this is
> to interrupt Linux's own GRUB bootloader).  Use apt-get or dpkg to
> force-uninstall CUPS, and see what happens from there.
>
> If you can't do that, you should be able to do something using a live
> boot disk.