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List:       dng
Subject:    Re: [DNG] Discovery #fail
From:       Steve Litt <slitt () troubleshooters ! com>
Date:       2021-03-29 1:56:47
Message-ID: 20210328215647.4fa9a2f0 () mydesk ! domain ! cxm
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Steve Scott via Dng said on Sun, 14 Mar 2021 16:34:25 +0000

>Greetings all,
>    I've been a long time Devuan user, and have donated to the project
> because I would very much like to see it continue. I recently was
> forced to upgrade my laptop, having completely destroyed my old one,
> and upon installation (dual boot) of Beowulf 3.1.0 and reboot, was
> dropped into a shell prompt, no graphics.
>LSPCI revealed only 2 devices were actually identified, the others
>merely providing vendor/device ID information, including the NVIDIA
>gfx device. dmidecode provided plenty of information however. I was
>able to install the driver from the vendor and get CUDA working, but
>was never able to get Xorg to recognize the display.
>
>Since a desktop was pretty critical to my needs for this machine, I
>gave Ubuntu a shot - not that I like Ubuntu all that much, but they do
>seem to have desktop setup polished well.
>
>Whadayaknow, Ubuntu pretty much discovered everything, so it appears I
>will be living here for the time being. Happy to provide whatever data
>you need. SWS

Except for systemd, Ubuntu's a dam good distro if you don't mind all
the guard rails and helpfulness.

There's no shame in using Ubuntu on it for 8 or so months until the
other distros catch up with the hardware. However, if you *do* want to
troubleshoot this issue and perhaps be running GUI Devuan within a day
or so, I'd suggest a process...

First understand that your laptop has an Nvidia graphics card:

T H A T ' S   N E V E R   G O O D .

* Uninstall your session manager or whatever lightdm and lxdm and those
things are called, so that you automatically boot to what in the old
days was called "level 3".

* Make sure things in CLI land are working well.

* Make *absolutely* sure that xterm is installed. On some distros it's
  not a hard requirement, even though xorg won't start without it.

* Use "xinit xterm" to try to go into GUI. If it succeeds, you've
  greatly narrowed the root scope scope. If not, you'll have a
  simpler log file to look over.

* Try a Devuan installer or a Devuan live CD or a Refracta live
  release. If this works, then there's a really good chance you can get
  hard disk installed Devuan to work. Save the output of lspci, lsusb,
  lshw (as root), lsmod, whatever apt command that shows you the
  installed packages, etc so you can create the same situation on a
  disk based install.

* Pay particular attention to the drivers you are using with nVidia.
  They can clash, some work and some don't, try to install as few
  drivers as you can, do a lot of experimentation. I got an nVidia to
  "sort of" work by doing this, but then the nVidia caused hard system
  hangs sometimes and other times reboots. I know it's too late for
  this, but in general, friends don't let friends buy nVidia. Radeon is
  your friend. In your case, being in a laptop, you'll just have to
  work around the hardware you have, by driver combination
  substitution, or with Ubuntu. By the way, my nVidia also rebooted and
  hung with Ubuntu, but Ubuntu right away got it to show (artifact
  laced) video.

HTH,

SteveT

Steve Litt 
Spring 2021 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful
Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques
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