I am not completely new to debian, I played around with it for almost a year on VMs, and started using it a lot for the last three months.
It is my first install on real hardware though.
I successfully installed debian 9 as a dual boot with windows 10.
I chose automatic partitioning of a free space of 37 gb next to the windows partition.
A swap and ext4 partition were created, efi recognized, everything was ok.
I know it is a small partition, but I checked on debian sites, and it should be more than enough to start customizing the system, and installing/setting basic applications I think.
The only thing that surprised me was the swap created was quite big; almost half the space, but I should trust that the installer knows better )
Everything went fine, grub was installed correctly.
The computer is an asus laptop, one year old, intel i7, 16gb ram, 500gb ssd.
The PC boots as expected, I get to the login where I can login with the user account as well as the root account.
The problem is that after logging in, there is nothing but the wallpaper and the cursor..
Absolutely nothing else.. No default shortcut / hotkey works, all I could notice is that ctrl + alt + f2 makes the cursor disappear.
Nothing else seems to happen whatever I try; I have to press the shutdown key to get out..
In recovery mode, at the end of what looks like a slow booting process, I am prompted for a root password for maintenance, and, given the alternative of pressing ctrl+shift+D to "continue".
At that point, entering root password logs me in a full screen terminal as root, and, only pressing 'enter' gets me to a full screen terminal like login.
There everything looks fine, all the folders I am used to see are there, I can run commands, update apt repository..
But, once in a while (I cannot reproduce every time), Ctrl+Shift+D brings me to the graphical usual login page, and logging from there starts a normal xfce session.
Within this session, everything works as expected, I can even log out and back into the session, but a restart brings me back to the options described above.
For information, windows boot is offered by Grub, and works perfectly.
Things I have tried:
I tried of course going through the install process again, I did it 4 times for the same results exactly every time. I used two different ISO images (1 downloaded today from the official site), on a cd, and, a usb once created with rufus, another time with windisk imager. The only thing I did not try yet is using a different repo source during installation..
I tried a solution I saw on various xfce threads to remove ~/.config/xfce4 , and/or, ~/.cache to no effect.
I also tried installing ldm package as it was suggested on an ubuntu forum, but no luck.
I ran
Code: Select all
apt install --reinstall xfce4
apt install --reinstall xfce4-goodies
I am sorry for such a lengthy question, especially for my first post, but I am desperate, I love debian and xfce, I practiced a bunch on VMs before taking the leap and finally giving up windows, so I am disappointed ...)
I would really appreciate any help as there is very little I could find by myself related to this issue.
Thanks a lot..