On 05/21/2017 12:52 PM, Michael Milliman wrote:
On 05/21/2017 12:23 PM, Jimmy Johnson wrote:
However, the OP's post does not mention anything of this nature. The OP deleted the existing Debian partition(s) leaving the existing Windows partition(s) alone. No mention was made of the ordering of the partitions on the drive. The OP then re-installed Debian with the Debian installer, effectively starting from scratch with Debian. Everything seems to work, except GNOME is crashing on boot. There are several things that can cause this, and I have caused some of them on my system before, however the fact that this is a fresh install limits the possible causes, the most likely of them being a missing (non-free?) video driver or some such required by GNOME to run properly. The way the OP went about scrapping and re-installing the Debian system is valid and should not have caused a problem under normal circumstances. Hence the suspicion of a missing driver (again probably non-free, and likely Radeon as well...I've had similar issues with my laptop).
I have a Lenovo laptop with the problem you describe and it's a kernel/video/plasma problem, works fine with the old Sid 4.7 kernel but not with the 4.9, first boot is ok, on restart you will not get the DM or x and may freeze up. Sometimes switching back and forth on the consoles will get you x, alt+ctrl+F2-F1-F3-F7. Jessie back-ports are also 4.9 and don't work right too. The problem here is an Intel-965-mobile, I'm going to install the Jessie kernel and see if that works or maybe a Ubuntu kernel, I think they are 4.4 and 4.8, I know the 4.4 will work, for me anyways, but I have to do something cause the 4.7 kernel is old now and not getting security updates.Hey, its better than the 3.16 kernel I was stuck with for a long time up until just a couple of months. :) In my case, laptop would boot, but the screen would be completely blanked out. If I caught the boot process at just the right time with a alt+ctl+F1, I could get it to finish booting, if I missed the window, it was power-off, power-on!! :( The first-boot on 3.16 would do usually boot into software emulation mode, and then I installed the Radeon drivers, and everything was OK. I have 4.9 running now and working fine. Video drivers and wifi drivers have been my bane for many a year!
I had to remove all Debian firmware and installed linux-image-generic and linux-headers-generic and Ubuntu's firmware-linux, but now it's running 4.4.0-21-generic, it's booting fine and I can get updates too. So this kernel problem I've had for more than a year is fixed, I was going to wait for Stretch to go final but I've waited long enough. This was on two systems Sid/Testing and Stretch. The version I'm using is Ubuntu 16.04, just in case the OP wants to try it, I used Synaptic to do the work and pinned the Debian release so not to pickup any other Ubuntu packages not needed and I was able to rid more than 800Mb of Debian kernel's on each system.
-- Jimmy Johnson Debian Sid/Testing - Plasma 5.8.6 - EXT4 at sda15 Registered Linux User #380263