On 10/23/2016 01:03 PM, Michael Lange wrote:
On Sun, 23 Oct 2016 12:14:39 -0400 "James P. Wallen" <jpwallen@comcast.net> wrote:Double checked to see if I was right about the video subsystem. It is not ATI, it is Intel integrated. No docs on this thing. It was never officially sold in U.S., where I live currently. Since I can't boot it to usable state, I can't (easily) find out exactly which video it uses. It's probably destine for re-installation anyway. I was just surprised to see such a failure occur after upgrade.If the device has worked with other kernel versions before, you could boot from an USB drive, do a chroot and install a kernel that works, this should be a pretty straightforward procedure.
Thanks, Michael. Yes, I posted originally from another e-mail account, so I'm sorry for any confusion that may have caused in the thread. I am planning to boot from a live image on USB key to try chrooting onto the system drive to fix it. I'll probably try update-grub first just in case something weird happened to grub-pc during that part of the upgrade. I could install a different kernel, but I'd prefer working on the system before doing that to see if there's a way to make the current kernel in testing work.
I'm kind of surprised that a minor kernel change of this type (probably) resulted in this problem. I'm not sure just what Debian's policy on kernel upgrades is. With major version changes, I think, the upgrade process leaves the old kernel in place so you can fall back on it if the new one fails. But minor revisions to the kernel just install the new kernel in place of the old one. I only noticed this change in upgrade policy -- if that is, indeed, what it is -- over the past couple of years.
This computer is definitely a corner case hardware-wise. The straight replacement of the kernel seems to have backfired in this case for this particular machine.
Many thanks for your suggestion.And if anyone has seen a bug report that might be pertinent, I'd appreciate a pointer. I've searched briefly, but found nothing.
Regards, JP