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

On Friday 13 October 2023 01:57:14 Dr. Nikolaus Klepp via tde-users wrote: Well, let's wait to see what you have to say after reading the rest of my description. I cannot really login via ssh from another machine, if that's what you mean, because I don't have another machine that I can use at present. However, I can change my sources.list and upgrade to Excalibur like that, if it is really necessary to test the theory. My gut instinct tells me that this is really a graphics issue; such as, a problem with my graphics card not being up to the new installation image of Devuan Daedalus. And if this is so, then it is unlikely that it will be better prepared for the installation image for Excalibur. Am I right? Bill

Oh, I forgot: You'd need "non-free-firmware" "and "non-free" repositories and you have to instll amd64-firmware. Nik Anno domini 2023 Fri, 13 Oct 13:49:32 +0200 Dr. Nikolaus Klepp via tde-users scripsit: -- Please do not email me anything that you are not comfortable also sharing with the NSA, CIA ...

William Morder via tde-users wrote: don't you try to install in text mode?

On Friday 13 October 2023 04:58:45 Dr. Nikolaus Klepp via tde-users wrote: Hmmm. So far I have managed to avoid using anything non-free, and would like to keep it that way. I have no problems getting online, despite occasional warnings about missing firmware. Do you believe that this missing firmware is the cause of these weird glitches? I mean, I have *never* used non-free firmware in any Devuan installation. Only my very first Debian installation, back in the days of Jessie, used non-free, and only because I wasn't yet familiar with a Debian system, and wanted to try to get past the lower hurdles. This is not the case now. I can generally keep my machine running and stable without using non-free firmware. But of course, these weird glitches that have started creeping in, in the past few months, could be a sign of things to come. Bill

On Friday 13 October 2023 05:40:34 deloptes via tde-users wrote: Yes, of course. That is always my first choice anyway. I don't generally install in graphics mode, but this is what I see when I try to make the system boot from the daedalus image on a USB flash drive. One of those screenshots is the high-graphics mode, the other is text-only, just like plain old-fashioned vanilla Debian used to be. Bill

Anno domini 2023 Fri, 13 Oct 07:08:36 -0700 William Morder via tde-users scripsit: Some of the glitches you observe most likely come from not having th microcode patches installed. Hardware nowadays is not what it used to be :) You'd need for your ideapad: amd64-microcode firmware-amd-graphics firmware-iwlwifi (most likely) Otherwise you should be good to go. If you want to get long battery runtimes then you can use this small program: --8<----8<----8<----8<----8<----8<-- #!/bin/bash #chown nik /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy*/scaling_max_freq if [ -z "$1" ]; then cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy*/scaling_max_freq elif [ "slow" = "$1" ]; then for i in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy*; do echo $(( $(cat $i/cpuinfo_min_freq) * 3)) > $i/scaling_max_freq done elif [ "fast" = "$1" ]; then for i in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy*; do cat $i/cpuinfo_max_freq > $i/scaling_max_freq done else echo "$(basename ""$0"") : print current freqency" echo "$(basename ""$0"") [slow|fast] : set freqency" fi --8<----8<----8<----8<----8<----8<-- Note, you need to call it with a delay of ~ 10 secs from TDE autostart - otherwise the powermanager will backstab you :) Nik -- Please do not email me anything that you are not comfortable also sharing with the NSA, CIA ...

Anno domini 2023 Fri, 13 Oct 08:49:53 -0700 William Morder via tde-users scripsit: Add "non-free-firmware" in the line after "non-free", e.g.: deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur main contrib non-free non-free-firmware Nik -- Please do not email me anything that you are not comfortable also sharing with the NSA, CIA ...

On Friday 13 October 2023 14:11:29 deloptes via tde-users wrote: Yes, they are not so expensive, but I dislike shopping online except when it cannot be avoided, and making a trip to the local computer shop is not very convenient here. But I do foresee this is my near future, as I need to get some more flash drives. Regarding the efi partition: the one on my installed system, for the internal hard drive in my laptop, is only 60 mb. It is not a matter to how big, but rather whether I would use an entire flash drive (however small, say 8 or 10 gb) for only 60 mb. I don't usually see flash drives smaller than that nowadays. However, if I can partition a flash drive like a small portable system (which I have done before with a 64 gb flash drive, and put the efi partition on that, as well, then use this efi partition on the flash drive to boot my system even if using the OS installed on my actual machine, not the OS installed on my flash drive, then it would not be a complete waste of a flash drive. I hope this is clear, what I intend to say. And it is always convenient to be able to carry around an complete OS in my pocket, to be able to boot any machine, in an emergency, from that flash drive, and to use the hardware only a kind of temporary host. I did experiment with running my entire system from a flash drive, and using my machine's hard drive merely as temporary storage (keeping everything else on external hard drives), and actually, this worked pretty well, if just a little slow. But in the long run it did not work, because I think it was too much stress on the flash drive itself, which eventually got corrupted and became unusable. To keep an OS (with all those partitons) on a flash drive just for emergency use, or sometime use when I am using another machine as a temporary host: that isn't a bad idea, though. I am just wondering, Can I use an efi partition -- installed on such a flash drive -- independently of the OS on that flash drive; in other words, to use that efi partition to boot the OS installed on my actual machine? To install a boot partition to an external source, such as a flash drive, is one of the installation options I get with Devuan, but I haven't tried this yet. Thanks for your help. Bill

William Morder via tde-users wrote: You have (most likely) already an EFI partition on your Windows. And yes 60mb is perhaps also too big :) But I meant here putting the whole system on a USB stick to test if it works or reproduce the problem and look for solution without impacting your working env. Yes, they wear out pretty fast, but also the quality matters. However as rescue system or for testing it is pretty good choice. I guess it is possible. I think that the EFI passes the boot process to grub. or they both work together. I forgot already.

Hi Bill! Did you succeed with moving to excalibur? Anno domini 2023 Fri, 13 Oct 15:37:18 -0700 William Morder via tde-users scripsit: When you have GRUB on your EFI on the flash it could work. But I have seen too many broken EFI BIOS that I would count on it. Nik -- Please do not email me anything that you are not comfortable also sharing with the NSA, CIA ...

Anno domini 2023 Sat, 14 Oct 01:10:14 -0700 William Morder via tde-users scripsit: No worries, it'll be fine, belive me ... :] Kernel 6.5 has better support for ryzen CPU, so things won't get worse (hopefully). As your ssd is in most parts a vaste desert now you can just copy your system to a spare folder and try the upgrade. If it does not work, just move folders around and be fine: # mkdir /old-root # mount --bind / /mnt # rsync -av /mnt/ /old-root # umount /mnt # rsync -av /boot/ /old-boot ... then do the upgrade. Don't count on that. See those almost vanished traces in the mud? These are my footprints ... -- Please do not email me anything that you are not comfortable also sharing with the NSA, CIA ...

On Saturday 14 October 2023 14:37:02 William Morder wrote: Hello Nik, and greetings to all ... Well, I did try what you, Nik, recommend here, but it really didn't work for me. The main problem is that hardly any TDE packages will download (apparently due to some compatibility issues with devuan excalibur), so I am left with only a skeleton system which is not nearly adequate for my needs. If I could have my dream room full of computers for testing, and only one or two that are my working machines, then I could probably figure this out. But alas, I just don't have the space at present, and my working machine is my only machine for everything. Anyway, so there was an overnight installation binge, and a lot of swearing and cursing whoever made this suggestion, but all is well now. At last I returned to devuan chimaera, which still installs just fine, using the plain text and expert mode, and everything is working; except of course that those "weird glitches" (which I described in earlier posts) still remain, and seem to have neither rhyme nor reason about them. It occurs to me just to buy a new wireless keyboard and mouse, but I haven't got that far yet. Next time I visit our local computer shop, I have put that on my list, along with some new flash drives, some Raspberry Pi devices, and other goodiess. One thing that was sort of interesting, and I would like to share a screenshot taken with my phone, but for some reason I cannot get it off my phone. Maybe later, as it's interesting. It looks like some sort of hippy dippy trippy poster from the 1960s, the sort of thing that we used to see to advertise rock concerts, love-ins, or some sort of event at a vegetarian commune somewhere out (very far out) in the countryside. Maybe somebody out there can explain to me why this happened. At that time, I had upgraded from devuan chimaera to daedalus, and it was after my last post to the mailing list. Things were working, but the machine was acting just a little more erratic than these weird glitches, so I rebooted, and when I got past the start-up screens and login screen (when my fingerprint splash window loads), suddenly all the colors were, I think, reversed: reds were green, etc. Also, my wifi no longer worked (no signals at all), and all window settings went from 1920 x 1080 to some really primitive-looking size, sort of like what we used to see on our computer screens from before about 1990. Now I am not quite sure what to do, as upgrading even from chimaera to daedalus has been not quite satisfactory, and upgrading further to excalibur doesn't work at all. Moreover, these new installation images seem to have some kind of issue with my own machine. I don't know if it's the graphics card or the AMD 64 Ryzen. (I have again attached the screenshot for my model and specs, as it's small, so if anybody's interested, they don't have to go sifting through all the previous posts in this thread.) It's still a pretty new machine, got it only about 18 months ago. And I took out the 128 gb SSD that came factory installed, and replaced it with a new, virgin, untouched 2 tb SSD, and never booted into a Windoze system at all, but install devuan chimaera on that on my first boot. Back when I first made the switch from debian to devuan, it was during the jessie release, when both distros shared the same name. Next came stretch/ascii, but I never did manage to get that installed. I waited, then skipped right over that release and went to devuan beowulf (= buster). Maybe that's what will have to happen here. Bill

On Friday 20 October 2023 14:52:32 Morder William wrote: Okay, so I managed to reinstall devuan chimaera on my machine, and it seems to be stable at present. I will have to observe how it behaves through a few reboots to see if those problems, previously described, return to haunt me. However, I do have one curious issue that I thought maybe somebody here would know how to resolve, or at least to find a workaround. I was having problems with my keyboard; it was an antediluvian Logitech Cordless keyboard/mouse combination. This thing is so old that the antenna thingie (don't know what this component is called) had two connections, both a USB 1.0 and one of those circular pin connectors, such as I remember for machines from the late 1980s and through the 1990s. But it has always worked pretty well, just need to recharge the batteries a lot. At last I broke down and bought a new wireless keyboard/mouse combination, in this case another Logitech, MK360. (The mouse is M360, the keyboard, K360.) And it worked like a charm. Suddenly everything was back to normal. Until ... I rebooted, then suddenly the keyboard hardly worked at all. It would recognize alt-ctrl-del, but nothing else that I could find. I kept changing back and forth between my new keyboard and old keyboard, while I was trying to get my system reinstalled, but these problems persisted. I tried to find a Logitech model in the Trinity's dialogue: TCC > Regional & Accessibility > Keyboard Layout > Keyboard model But apparently the Logitech Cordless keyboard/mouse combination setting is still closest, even though this keyboard is very different from my old one. The weirdest part of this is, my old keyboard, though it still has those same issues described in previous posts, at least is recognized, and can be used for most of what I do, except that now I have to use a lot of awkward tricks to get the machine to do what I want. The new keyboard, after reboot, did not work at all. After some more messing round, reinstallation, reboots, etc., I discovered that TDE's Secure Attention Key setting seems to have some effect on this problem. I would still like to use this feature, so I am wondering if there is a workaround to get my keyboard to work. Or, maybe another route: maybe I can create some kind of special keyboard mapping just for my model? I'm not sure how to go about this. I tried to trace the issue as far as I can, but maybe others will have some idea how to go about this. Any help or suggestions are appreciated. Bill