Solved - Debian 9.6.0 amd64 freezes during boot

[jwsarge2]

Good morning all,

Debian 9.6 es un pedazo de caca IMHO. I'm finding it, as installed, doesn't recognize common command line inputs like update grub, shutdown -r now, and numerous others; I can't even get it to boot up anymore. Years ago I used to enjoy building the kernel to match up with the hardware when installing so I'm not a beginner but hey, man was on the moon since then. If the Debian Project wants to limit their product's following to a select, very patient group of users who desire other than an alternate home OS then stay on course. Otherwise they should wake up, smell the coffee, climb up out of the pit, put their thinking caps on and quit hanging a right at 3rd base.

[bw123]

You're cracking me up... but to stay on topic. Why can't you boot now? The commands you mentioned all work for me as root (update-grub with a dash), but I may have installed some additional pkgs for shutdown? can't remember.

re: the problems you mentiond
Well, we got a little bit of this going on, but not too bad yet. I think they are all trying to get a job cleaning bathrooms for RedHat or something? Wouldn't it be nice to add on a resume that you, "maintained debian pkg Upstream_bs for three years, coordinating with upstream developers, and technical commitee" and hey, you never know, might land a nice job someday. People who keep their mouth shut about problems and promote the corp get promoted. People who find and solve problems are a PR nightmare. Management has no use for people who recognize or point out or solve problems. This is well known corporate culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suck_up_kick_down

Obviously, a headhunter will be sent in to get them all to resign or hired off to some flunky company (no severance or unemployment) before upper mgmt finds out about the screw up. We peons on the bottom only have to wait.

[jwsarge2]

Good morning bw123,

I got frustrated and DBAN'd the drive. I used the - in update-grub and led the line with sudo. Not sure if I'll give it another try with the fresh HDD, pondering it presently. I really used to like Debian early on but as many probably have done went on to try others, ubuntu variants, BSD, Suse, etc... Hate to say this but right now my most reliable machine (have 2 desktops, 1 for linux only, the other with Win) runs on Windoze 10 Pro. No idea why it quit booting, had added the systemd.restore_status=0 to grub, checked it with e as it came up out of the post, etc... Whatever, thanks again for your encouragement and feedback, most appreciated. Have a great holiday week...

[jwsarge2]

Solved, maybe, maybe not...

Good morning bw123,

I wiped the drive and re-installed Debian 9.6, choosing the LXDE and Debian Desktop environments; same issue though. I then re-installed Lubuntu again choosing the LXDE desktop environment and it also did not work, same issue. While doing some browsing in user forums I came across a guy who solved a similar problem by selecting the Mate desktop environment. So I inserted the Debian 9.6 DVD back in, installed it again but this time I did not select the Debian desktop environment, instead I selected Cinnamon, Mate and LXDE. The Mate desktop environment opened up after the install finished (not sure why it over the other 2) and there I had my 1920x1080 resolution and after 4 reboots it still is working as desired. Seems to be an easy to use environment, slightly different than what I'm used to but just a matter of using/learning it. Perhaps LXDE has a hidden issue with the current build of Debian 9.6 that Mate doesn't but I am not counting my ducks yet, need to use it more and be sure. So, it's a TBD right now, just wanted to pass this along. If it keeps working over a reasonable period of time I'll label this solved. Wishing you and all a Happy Thanksgiving...

[jwsarge2]

Good morning,

My last post was labeled "Solved, maybe, maybe not... Well it is NOT...

After a few days the system again stopped booting up, read - never made it through the boot process, froze instead and the only way to turn it off was by holding down the power button. So I changed grub to boot to a terminal instead of the GUI. This made a difference for a few boots but again it started freezing up before the boot process was completed. I stumbled on what seems to help; when the boot option is displayed prior to grub taking over on it's own I hit Enter immediately and that seems to allow the system to boot to tty1. I then check for updates from the command line and afterwards I enter startx. The system then opens up the Mate DE. Aarrrggghhhh

[jwsarge2]

Good afternoon,

As mentioned in my last post, I had edited grub so the system booted to tty1 and then would use startx to shift to the Mate DE with a 1920x1080 resolution. While this got me the desired resolution in my desktop I was unable to sit on my hands and continued exploring for ways to have the system open with the gui vs using the tty1 run around. When I ran lspci I noted the nvidia card which got me to thinking about reverting to a nvidia driver vs continuing with the current nouveau driver so I installed and ran nvidia-detect which pointed to the 304xx driver. I then ran sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) followed by sudo apt-get install nvidia-legacy-304xx-driver, edited the /etc/default/grub to get it back to booting to the gui, ran update-grub and sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target (I had changed that default when I set the system up to boot to tty1). Restarting the system has the nvdia driver now running instead of the nouveau one and that seems to have done the trick. Solved. I have always liked Nvdia...