On Fri 12 Jun 2020 at 14:22:03 (-0700), Gary L. Roach wrote:On 6/11/20 1:24 AM, Dominique Dumont wrote:On mercredi 10 juin 2020 19:53:53 CEST Gary L. Roach wrote:The sequence of events on boot up are Bios screen, Debian Window with OS selection, Boot up sequence, login/password ( Xorg not running), startx -> error window. So to answer your question, the message is after login/password.Right.. Looks like there's no display manager installed. Depending on your favorite environment, could you install one of sddm, lxdm or gdm ? On my side, I used sddm.Question: Where is the file that contains the display setup (ie refresh rate, resolution.)This can be set in /etc/X11/xorg.conf in some cases (e.g. for nvidia hardware). Now, most of the required information is retrieved from hardware by Xorg. xorg.conf can usually be removed (except with nvidia driver).Where would randr get its information if Xorg was running?>From Xorg process.I would have responded sooner but have been hit with a severe case of Vertigo.No problem.I think I have finally found the problem. Running "journalct -xb" and running down the listing, I found that I was missing a Radeon video driver. The driver is non-free and the installation disk doesn't setup the sources.list for non-free downloads. So I'm in a catch 22 situation. When I install the net-install buster disk and switch to recover mode the network is not available and without the network I can't get the firmware I need to get the system started. I've tried the debian-live-10.40-amd64-kde+non-free disk and found it very confusing. In short, it didn't work either. There is a firmware package "firmware-amd-graphics"in the debian suit but without network access I can't get at it. If anyone could tell me how to start the network in rescue mode it would help. Why is the network shut down in rescue mode in the first place.I can't quite follow why you need rescue mode. After the login/password ( Xorg not running) in your sequence above, just don't run startx. Then edit the sources list, adding non-free to it. Now run apt or apt-get to update, and install the package. $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install firmware-amd-graphics I've attached my sources.list as a pattern, though you can leave out the lines starting with deb-src. Cheers, David.
Thanks for the reply. I have finally solved this problem. First, if I let the OS load normally, I get the video error message and the system locks up. If I use rescue mode there is no network access. Catch 22.
The actual problem was that I was missing the proper firmware for my Radeon video card. I finally found this by running "journalctl -xb" which lists all of the steps in the boot process. The error showed up in bright red on my system. Since the firmware is non-free and the normal net-install disk doesn't add contrib and non-free to the sources.list, I was stuck until I found the debian-live disks. I used the debian-live-10.40-amd64-xxx-+non-free disk. When the first choice screen pops up do not select the debian-live choice but the normal debian installation. This disk adds contrib and non-free to the sources.list. Booting this up allowed me to download the firmware I needed. Problem solved.
Gary R