Bug#1002921: installation-reports: No Screen Reader, Cannot boot into MATE GUI, Root only can

[Holger Wansing <hwansing@mailbox.org>]

Hi,

"D.J.J. Ring, Jr." <n1ea@arrl.net> wrote (Sat, 1 Jan 2022 13:37:20 -0500):
> 1.  Cannot boot into MATE GUI means that I cannot boot into the MATE
> Graphical User Interface with the user account - which is what is expected
> to happen after a normal successful installation.   I did some
> investigation  into this.
> 
> This is what I did:  .  I disabled lightdm using systemctl disable lightdm
> then more recently I used the root command "systemctl set-default
> multi-user.target" and now I see I cannot even log in as my regular user.

This is what I had expected, so in the first run it's not an issue with the 
MATE GUI.

> I tried a new named user and did the same installation, I had the very same
> problems with the new username.
> 
> My /home/djringjr/ folder was used successfully with the last Debian Buster
> release.

Hmm, I wonder what that means exactly, as well as the following sentence:

> [...]  When
> installing for my normal user account, I do not format /home/myuser folder.

Do you re-use an old/existing home folder of some user account somehow for the
new user?
I don't know if that is supposed to work. 
I only know the szenario, where a complete new home folder is created 
automatically, when a new user is added to the system (with the "useradd" 
command).

> I have entered the root account and re-entered my useraccount password.  I
> have done this several times.  Remember this also happened when I had an
> entirely new user account with a newly made /home/newuser folder.

So you have tried, to log in as root on the console and type
"adduser yourusername" to create a completely new user?
And see if you can successfully login into that new account with
"su -l yourusername" ?


> I know the username password is correct because as root I enter "su
> myusername" and I am in user account, then from my user account,  I type
> "su myusername" and I receive a prompt for my password.  I have further
> checked by entering an incorrect password and received "authentication
> failure" response.
> 
> root@debian:~# su djringjr
> djringjr@debian:/root$ su djringjr
> Password: [I enter the correct password\
> djringjr@debian:/root$ exit
> exit
> djringjr@debian:/root$ su djringjr
> Password: [I enter an incorrect password\
> su: Authentication failure
> djringjr@debian:/root$
> 
> You asked me to state the problems again, here they are.
> 
> 1. During installation I chose accessible text installation, the installer
> appeared to detect my sound card, but after that I hear no sound from the
> screen reader.  

That might be the issue described here:
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/debian-installer/#errata

I do not  use a Braille device, so I cannot comment on
> Braille.  I still have limited vision, so I was able to finish the
> installation.
> When I rebooted, I had screen reader, but there were additional problems.
> I also tried the live DVD to install  and I had the exact problems.  I
> believe I tried the 11.0 release with firmware four or five times,  and I
> have tried the 11.2 firmware release at least four times, and the 11.2 live
> release twice, all gave me the exact same problems. The system was unusable
> as regular user in every case except it WAS usable in the console if I
> logged in as root, then logged in as username.
> 
> 2. I cannot log in as my user account into console.  This also means had I
> not disabled graphical user log on with lightdm, I would not  be able to
> log on to the MATE GUI as is the subject of my error report.
> 
> 3.  I can  log into my root account in console, and before I disabled
> lightdm  I was able  to log in with lightdm to the MATE GUI, however,
> running orca -s says no speech available.  See the error file I produced by
> running "orca -s 2> orcaerrors" then interrupting the terminal with
> control-c.  I also get multiple AT-SPI errors which are in the attached
> orcaerrors file.

I guess that all might be caused by the fact that the user account is
somehow not activated/corrupted/not working correctly.


Holger


-- 
Holger Wansing <hwansing@mailbox.org>
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