[tde-users] Re: half-baked devuan installation - please help

On Friday 13 October 2023 00:10:09 Dr. Nikolaus Klepp via tde-users wrote: Yes, as I said, I got into the bios to change to legacy boot, legacy first, etc. I explain in some detail (maybe too much detail) in the original post. Everything is fine in my regular working system. These problems occur only when I am trying to install Devuan Daedalus. Both the testing version and the new release, the stable version, behave the same in this regard. I cannot make out anything at all when booting from the USB flash drive with Daedalus. However, it works when I put Devuan Chimaera on that flash drive. I never booted into the original 128 gb SSD. (It has never been touched, just sitting in a box of parts.) When I got the laptop home, first thing I did was to take it apart and put in a brand-new, virgin SSD, 2 tb. It was on this that I installed Linux on first boot, and have gone through only Devuan Chimaera and now Daedalus. I will have to find an image and put it on USB. I can boot from a Slacko disc, kind of an older one. I can boot from a Debian Beowfulf live disc. If I put Devuan Chimaera back on this USB, then I am pretty sure that it will also boot just fine, as it did before, whenever I've installed from it. (My other USB flash drives have gradually got corrupted, and I need to buy some new ones. I just have one other, that I use for personal files that I need to take with me sometimes when I am out and about in the so-called real world.) I started to type out the model number, etc., but must beg forgiveness for my old eyes that get tired of squinting. Instead, I have attached a small screenshot of from the actual order, which shows the model number, original specs, etc. As I said elsewhere, I swapped the original internal SSD, 128 gb, for a new untouched 2 tb SSD, and it was on this that I installed Linux on my first boot. Neither Windoze nor any other OS has touched my machine, only Devuan. Greetings, Nik! Maybe I did not make this part clear; but I don't otherwise get this weird messed-up screen -- except when I am attempting to *install* Devuan Daedalus from a USB flash drive. Now that I am back into my regular system, no problems of that sort. Boots up just fine. However, I have been noticing all kinds of weird glitches in this Devuan Daedalus system. (I installed Chimaera first, then upgraded by changing sources.list.) I was hoping this could be attributed to the fact that it wasn't quite approved as stable yet. I jumped the gun a bit, because I wanted to get rid of some kind of creeping instability issues that I was noticing in Chimaera. Now, just to clarify the sequence of events: I tried installing a Devuan Daedalus testing version (devuan_daedalus_5.0.0-rc8_amd64_desktop.iso) from a flash drive, but I got these same kinds of weird messed-up screens. At the time, I put it to the fact that it was, after all, as testing version, not quite ready for prime time. So then I put Devuan Chimaera (devuan_chimaera_4.0.0_amd64_desktop.iso) back on that USB drive. Somewhere along the way, this original flash drive got corrupted, and I am unsure of the exact place in this sequence. No problem; once I realized that the USB was corrupted (reading only 190 mb capacity instead of 64 gb!), I got out my own flash drive, exactly the same as the first, only unused (SanDisk Ultra, I think?), and put the Devuan Chimaera on that matching USB flash drive. From there -- on a new untouched, never used USB flash drive, but the same brand and specs as the previous one -- I installed my Devuan Chimaera system again. And then, from there, I changed my sources.list to Daedalus, and upgraded like that. Only, like I said, still all these weird glitches.... But at least I do at present have a running system, which is "sort of stable" in the sense that it doesn't actually crash or anything. There are just a whole lot of strange things that never happened before on any of my systems, ever, and I am mystified. E.g, * Some functions don't work on my external keyboard. When I try to use some everyday keyboard shortcuts like alt-tab to switch viewed pages within a desktop (e.g., between Kmail's main page and this working email), I can only do so by using my laptop's keyboard, not by using my external keyboard. (It has occurred to me that maybe I just need a new keyboard/mouse combo, but I haven't got that far yet, as thus far it indicates that everything is just hunky-dory.) But when I try to use my external keyboard to swap pages, I get intead only the tab space, and the alt- part of the command is not recognized. Same with most other keyboard shortcuts, like alt-F2, etc. Except, except ... about once in every 20 reboots, suddenly all those shortcut functions work again on my external keyboard. * External hard drives now will not stay writable when mounted. (However, I can still read from them, such as to play sound files. Sometimes, when working with text documents, I can continue to write to the external hard drive, but not always. Still, this is the exception. The 4 hard drives are SSDs, 2 formatted ext3 and 2 as ext4; the only reason for this difference is how long I have had them. Only one, formatted ext3, is sometimes writable, if I am working on text documents, OpenOffice docs, etc. I can generally write to them (such as copying files from my system's internal hard drive to one of the external drives) for a little while, maybe half an hour or so, if I am continuously copying a few large files, but otherwise the external drives become unwritable after only maybe 10 or 15 minutes. Sort of like sudo permissions, now that I think of it ...? There are a host of other similar glitches, but these are a few of the highlights. And now that I have upgraded to Devuan Daedalus, the glitches, if anything, are only getting worse. And now, apologies to everybody for the length. I have tried to be as thorough as possible in describing these issues, while also hitting on only what seem to me the most salient points. Hereafter I'll try just to refer back to this description, unless something new comes up. See attachment for laptop specs. By the way, the laptop is new as of early December 2021, so not quite 2 years old. And after I got it set up as I wanted, looking and running like my old desktop system, everything has been pretty smooth sailing ... until this new Devuan Daedalus release. thanks to all, Bill