Debian operating system

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17750757

Randomly on my laptop screen this appears and debian just freezes. Sometimes these vertical lines don't appear and system freezes anyway. Its just random. How do i identify if this is hardware or software issue? and then how to identify exact piece of hardware or software causing this problem.

My system seems to crash from time to time. I still don't know what causes it.

If I leave it untouched for a few hours, sometimes, it crashes.

To resume, I have to force a reboot by unplugging the power cable (not even pressing the power button for N seconds seems to work).

Then, it seems to work just fine (after displaying some error messages about lost or orphaned inodes at boot). Until, one day, it happens again. When? I never know. It seems to follow some strange and unpredictable pattern.

Where should I start investigating?

Hey guys,

Im a relatively new Linux user, so pardon the stupidity thats about to follow. I have an Asus gaming laptop on which I installed Debian 13/ testing. Everything worked well, until I tried installing new AMD drivers.

I followed this wiki article for the installation of the drivers. However after I ran the command

# apt-get install firmware-amd-graphics libgl1-mesa-dri libglx-mesa0 mesa-vulkan-drivers xserver-xorg-video-all

and rebooted my system, I was no longer able to access my Desktop ("unable to access Cinnamon session").

The good news is I can still access the terminal via Ctrl & alt & f2. However I am not able to reinstall cinnamon because I dont have network access (I think).

I might be wrong but I think thats because before rebooting I ran a VPN with killswitch enabled, which is now blocking my network access, but I have no idea how to disable this from the terminal.

Could you help a noob out to repair his system?

I would hate to reinstall and lose all my data :(

What is the best way to back up as much as possible of Debian 12 on my laptop to a server that has SSH available? I am currently backing up my users /home/ folder, but I would like to be able to nuke and restore the system from a backup.

I have ventoy on an external drive if that helps any.

P.S. I would like to be able to do incremental backups too.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14997235

From https://old.reddit.com/r/wallpaper/comments/1c9d2gk/debian_gnulinux_wallpaper_19201080_76804320/

Congratulations to Andreas!
It seems like he has lots of ideas for how to improve things in packaging, and for communicating with other distros. Debian is a big ship to steer, and I personally hope the leader can facilitate people working together to reach our goals.

What do you think of the platforms?

https://www.debian.org/vote/2024/platforms/tille

https://www.debian.org/vote/2024/platforms/srud

I'm using Debian 12 with Gnome on my Surface Go 2, and while the multitouch gestures are great, when I use them I also click on anything where I start a 3 finger gesture. I like my panel hidden except in the Dash overview, but I disabled this so I don't have to use gestures. When I do use them I have to use them on an empty part of the screen to prevent clicking anything.

Is there any setting I can change to prevent left clicks when using 3 finger gestures?

#!/bin/bash

#Requires: html2text, wget

wget -q -O - https://www.debian.org/releases/ | html2text > /tmp/debian.txt

cat <<EOF

$(grep '* Debian.*[Rr]elease' /tmp/debian.txt)

$(grep 'current testing' /tmp/debian.txt)

This system:

$(lsb_release -a)

EOF

rm -f /tmp/debian.txt

sleep 60

exit 0

Does anyone know when the new KDE plasma 6 is expected to be on unstable?

I usually switch to testing about 1 year after the release of stable. We're about the 9 month mark and I'm getting anxious. Any major issues running testing? This is for my main desktop.

I've heard that Wayland works a lot better now on Nvidia GPUs, so I wanted to give it a try. I've heard that GNOME wants to focus on Wayland, and that it is selected by default. BUT... I can't find it. When checking the server in the terminal, it says X11. And when on the login screen, I can choose between GNOME and GNOME Classic, which is also X11. I really want to at least try it out, as the variable refresh rate and some of the screen taring improvements would really benefit me, but I have not yet found the right package (?) To install.

Just installed Debian 12 on a Dell Inspiron 14 Plus. I know there are those out there who are curious about different machines, and especially the Dell machines that come prepackaged with Windows 11 and all the bloat you can shake a stick at.

Reporting in that it works great, it's lightning fast, it required zero driver installation. It just works, right out of the box.

Now I've messed with a few different Linux packages before, but I've never had it on a main machine. I've done this because I'm highly dissatisfied with Microsoft burying generative AI directly into the operating system so that you're forced to see it, if not interact with it. And who knows what it's doing with your data.

Not going to be me, but now I've got to maybe find a replacement for Photoshop, and figure out how to get Steam on here, and a few of my other work programs. But all-in-all I'm extremely surprised that all I had to do was install it and I was good to go.

I suppose I'll close this out with a question to start some discussion: What are your go-to apps to install right out of the box on a fresh Debian setup?

I am supposing this will not work - simply using dd to copy the booted disk /dev/sda for example to a file on an external hard drive. This would not be a good back as too many system file would be missed. right?

Updating to kernel 6.1.0-18 with Nvidia driver installed, seams broken?

I get a lot of "error processing package" from pdkg, complaining about dependency problems.

Apparently I'm not the only one: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77974173/dependency-problems-while-updating-kernel-6-1-0-18

New debian user here. I'm using sway and have a script in my waybar config to look for upgrades and indicate if any are available. However, it typically doesn't find anything because I first need to run a sudo apt update first.

I don't really want to figure out someway to do a sudo through this script and was curious how gnome finds updates without me needing to enter a password.

It looks like I can use unattended upgrades to do the apt update.

https://wiki.debian.org/UnattendedUpgrades

though I don't want it to do upgrades until I do a sudo apt upgrade after being notified of upgrades. I created a 02periodic file in /etc/apt/apt.config.d as indicated, but I only included the lines

APT::Periodic::Enable "1";

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";

Will this run an apt update every day for me? Is there any issue I'm unaware of in doing this? Thanks for any help!

Anyone else having this oddity? Debian SID here!

I have a small server in my closet which is running 4 Debian 12 virtual machines under kvm/libvirt. The virtual machines have been running fine for months. They have unattended-upgrades enabled, and I generally leave them alone. I only reboot them periodically, so that the latest kernel upgrades get applied.

All the machines have an LVM configuration. Generally it's a debian-vg volume group on /dev/vda for the operating system, which has been configured automatically by the installer, and a vgdata volume group on /dev/vdb for everything else. All file systems are simple ext4, so nothing fancy. (*)

A couple of days ago, one of the virtual machines didn't come up after a routine reboot and dumped me into a maintenance shell. It complained that it couldn't mount filesystems that were on vgdata. First I tried simply rebooting the machine, but it kept dumping me into maintenance. Investigating a bit deeper, I noticed that vgdata and the block device /dev/vdb were detected but the volume group was inactive, and none of the logical volumes were found. I ran vgchange -a y vgdata and that brought it back online. After several test reboots, the problem didn't reoccur, so it seemed to be fixed permanently.

I was willing to write it off as a glitch, but then a day later I rebooted one of the other virtual machines, and it also dumped me into maintenance with the same error on its vgdata. Again, running vgchange -y vgdata fixed the problem. I think two times in two days the same error with different virtual machines is not a coincidence, so something is going on here, but I can't figure out what.

I looked at the host logs, but I didn't find anything suspicious that could indicate a hardware error for example. I should also mention that the virtual disks of both machines live on entirely different physical disks: VM1 is on an HDD and VM2 on an SSD.

I also checked if these VMs had been running kernel 6.1.64-1 with the recent ext4 corruption bug at any point, but this does not appear to be the case.

Below is an excerpt of the systemd journal on the failed boot of the second VM, with what I think are the relevant parts. Full pastebin of the log can be found here.

Dec 16 14:40:35 omega lvm[307]: PV /dev/vdb online, VG vgdata is complete.
Dec 16 14:40:35 omega lvm[307]: VG vgdata finished
...
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: dev-vgdata-lvbinaries.device: Job dev-vgdata-lvbinaries.device/start timed out.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: Timed out waiting for device dev-vgdata-lvbinaries.device - /dev/vgdata/lvbinaries.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: Dependency failed for binaries.mount - /binaries.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: Dependency failed for local-fs.target - Local File Systems.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: local-fs.target: Job local-fs.target/start failed with result 'dependency'.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: local-fs.target: Triggering OnFailure= dependencies.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: binaries.mount: Job binaries.mount/start failed with result 'dependency'.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: dev-vgdata-lvbinaries.device: Job dev-vgdata-lvbinaries.device/start failed with result 'timeout'.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: dev-vgdata-lvdata.device: Job dev-vgdata-lvdata.device/start timed out.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: Timed out waiting for device dev-vgdata-lvdata.device - /dev/vgdata/lvdata.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: Dependency failed for data.mount - /data.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: data.mount: Job data.mount/start failed with result 'dependency'.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: dev-vgdata-lvdata.device: Job dev-vgdata-lvdata.device/start failed with result 'timeout'.

(*) For reference, the disk layout on the affected machine is as follows:

# lsblk 
NAME                  MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
vda                   254:0    0   20G  0 disk 
├─vda1                254:1    0  487M  0 part /boot
├─vda2                254:2    0    1K  0 part 
└─vda5                254:5    0 19.5G  0 part 
  ├─debian--vg-root   253:2    0 18.6G  0 lvm  /
  └─debian--vg-swap_1 253:3    0  980M  0 lvm  [SWAP]
vdb                   254:16   0   50G  0 disk 
├─vgdata-lvbinaries   253:0    0   20G  0 lvm  /binaries
└─vgdata-lvdata       253:1    0   30G  0 lvm  /data

# vgs
  VG        #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize   VFree
  debian-vg   1   2   0 wz--n- <19.52g    0 
  vgdata      1   2   0 wz--n- <50.00g    0 

# pvs
  PV         VG        Fmt  Attr PSize   PFree
  /dev/vda5  debian-vg lvm2 a--  <19.52g    0 
  /dev/vdb   vgdata    lvm2 a--  <50.00g    0 

# lvs
  LV         VG        Attr       LSize   Pool Origin Data%  Meta%  Move Log Cpy%Sync Convert
  root       debian-vg -wi-ao----  18.56g                                                    
  swap_1     debian-vg -wi-ao---- 980.00m                                                    
  lvbinaries vgdata    -wi-ao----  20.00g                                                    
  lvdata     vgdata    -wi-ao---- <30.00g 

Looks like there is another issue in the recently updated kernel 6.1.66 which prevents shutdown with certain WiFi modules. At least my laptop now doesn't shutdown anymore and needs a hard power off 😐

If you are on the stable kernel and use ext4, do not upgrade to linux kernel package 6.1.64-1

It has a bad data corruption bug

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1057843

I have suddenly found that /usr/games has disappeared off my path. Not only that but my normal otherwise but sudo enabled user seems to have a superuser's path?

rhudson@adam:~$ echo $PATH /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin

rhudson@adam:~$ id -u 1000

What would have changed suddenly? It was not like this yesterday. kpat is in /usr/games and I was able to launch it from task manager yesterday, but not today.

I have rebooted twice so far. I can run kpat by opening it from Dolphin.

I don't want to have to re-install : ^ (