On Monday 10 November 2025 23:15:29 Dr. Nikolaus Klepp via tde-users wrote:
Anno domini 2025 Mon, 10 Nov 18:22:57 -0800
This is sort of still related to the previous thread, so I wanted to keep it as a sub-thread for reference; but now maybe I need at least to branch it off into something new.
I tried upgrading my system, as all seem to agree that now is the time. However, things did not go smoothly.
First I tried just changing my sources.list (currently running Devuan) to point to excalibur repositories, then attempted to upgrade directly from daedalus to excalibur. This seemed to work just fine, until sometime shortly after I installed usrmerge, my network connection totally disappeared; by which I mean, no wifi available at all.
After that, I tried to do a minimal installation with my USB and the chimaera image; then immediately upgraded to daedalus, then again immediately upgraded to excalibur. And only then did I attempt to continue with the installation of other packages. However, while I can upgrade from chimaera to daedalus, I cannot upgrade from chimaera to daedalus, then to excalibur. I did not try to upgrade directly from chimaera to excalibur; I have heard, from others who tried it, that skipping over a release tends to create problems.
The only other odd thing about the installation was some line asking permission for some packages to do with postgresql (something or other, about 4 or 5 packages). No, I did not take notes, although I know that I probably ought to have done; however, I must plead extenuating circumstances. (Some of this I mentioned before, more gory details are available upon request.)
At present, I cannot use another machine for comparison.
If there is something basic that I am missing here, and anybody out there has a clue, please help. Otherwise, I seem to be stuck in my daedalus system (which is now oldstable), and cannot upgrade to excalibur.
I believe that this could be caused by one of two things:
1) When I upgraded from chimaera to daedalus, I was unable to use a daedalus installation image. I tried putting it on a USB, but when I booted it up, the graphics were all scrambled, and I was unable to proceed past the opening screen. (I described this is some detail, way back when....) So I put my chimaera image on the USB, installed from that; then I upgraded from there to a daedalus system (by changing the repos in my sources.list.) I know this seems a bit convoluted, but when I cannot make out what's on the screen, there is not much else I can do. This seems to have been a problem with the graphics card, or something like that on this machine. I bought it new only a couple years ago. It may be that, new or not, it was already obsolescent, and now maybe can only be trashed.
2) I never use non-free software. I mean, up until now I have been able to avoid it, and my network has always been fine. It may be that my network issues over the past year, the occasional hangs or freezing, is something to do with that. I prefer to stick with GNU/Linux free/libre software, but maybe there is a way around it, such as using a wifi antenna, and turning off the wifi in the bios.
3) This brings me to a fresh surprise: I can no longer get into my bios. I disable UEFI, and am using grub to boot, which has worked well. Then I started getting a window, right after boot, asking if I want to continue a normal boot, go into bios setting, a recovery startup and something else. (There were 4 choices; I will try to take a photo with my next boot.) When I tried to get into the bios, I was asked for a password; but I don't use a password to protect the bios. I used to create an admin password, but it is a bother, when nobody else ever touches this machine, and no ordinary person would be able to get into it, anyway, if they ever got their hands on it.
If I didn't create a bios password, then who did? And is it possible for me to get back into my bios? I don't make changes often, but it would be nice to own my own machine. I keep thinking that maybe this has something to do with disabling UEFI and using grub; except that for a while, nothing changed.
This simplest solutions that I can think of at the moment is for me to buy a couple extra flash drives, so that I can put a genuine excalibur installation image on one of them. Then that possibility will be ruled out (that is, that I might succeed installing directly from the excalibur image). But if I put excalibur on a flash drive, and I get the same scrambled screen as when I tried it with daedalus, then I have no way to go back to a working system ... at least, not without much more trouble.
If anybody out there has some idea what might be going on, I would appreciate the help. At the moment, I have got my daedalus system back and working normally; but I would like to move forward. It may be that I will have to buy yet another laptop, one with hardware that can meet the demands of newer systems.
Also, by the way, I hesitate to upgrade to the latest TDE release; since I already have problems, I felt that this could only complicated matters even more.
I am unsure how to proceed, if I can proceed at all. It may be that I can hold off upgrading until I get myself completely moved out of the city. Then at least I will have all my things in one place, and life is much slower there, and I won't have to manage so many disasters all at the same time.
Bill