libera/#devuan/ Friday, 2021-08-13

UsLhello people! Hope everyones summer was/is fine. I have a peculiar problem and I wonder if anyone has encountered it. I'm still on ascii (waiting for chimaera release) and it has been smooth and stable all the time until recently. xscreensaver no longer displays when I try to log in after I lock the screen with ctrl alt del. It does so if I do it right away. But if I come back an hour later it's gone and won't display. Switching ttys do nothing. No keyboard input is17:19
UsLregistering as far as I can tell. Not even magic sysrq with reisub works. Nothing. Just blank screen. This started right before my vacation three weeks ago.17:19
UsLand just now bash wouldn't even start. Just gave me a blank terminal with no prompt and input.17:21
UsLalt f4 and trying to restart gave me a blank screen and then nothing.17:22
UsLjust discovered that no tty is working except the graphical ctrl alt f717:24
gnarfaceand you're sure you didn't change any relevant configs?17:26
gnarfacethe virtual terminals are supposed to be defined in /etc/inittab17:26
gnarfacebut you should also see them running in the process list17:26
gnarfacetry: ps aux |grep getty17:27
UsLI've done nothing of the kind17:27
UsLI'll try17:27
UsLtty 1.6 is there alright17:28
UsL*1-617:28
gnarfaceit does sound like a common bug i've seen with failure for nvidia cards to resume from sleep properly, but it would have been affecting you this whole time17:28
gnarfacechange kernels recently?17:29
UsLyeah, this is smthng new. And I have no nvidia card.17:29
UsLI guess I got an upgrade fairly recently.17:29
gnarfaceany errors in dmesg?17:29
gnarfacethere could be a regression in the upgrade17:29
UsLnothing in dmesg17:29
UsLexcept the old stuff I had since always.17:30
UsLcpu errata stuff17:30
UsLtimings are off17:30
gnarfacecould the virtual terminals be there but just not rendering right?  maybe it's a kms modesetting auto-detect failure17:34
UsLthe laptop is from 2007 though. But if there were serious stuff I guess dmesg and smartctl would pick it up. The disk is new ssd I got along with a memory upgrade.17:35
gnarfaceoh it's a laptop?17:35
UsLyes17:35
gnarfacetry to see if there's any difference between whether it's plugged in and fully charged or not17:35
UsLit's always plugged in since batteries are almost dead17:35
gnarfacethe only other common type of failure that comes to mind that could be causing this other than a kernel regression is hardware failure, and the only type of hardware failure that causes this type of gremlins without also causing errors in the logs is power supply failure17:36
gnarfacecould be a weakening power supplyl17:36
gnarfacebut i'd look into a kernel issue first, maybe with the framebuffer resolution auto-detection behavior17:37
gnarfaceyou don't still happen to have the old kernel installed, do you?17:37
gnarfaceyou could reboot to it and just use it for a while to see if the problem magically vanishes17:37
UsLI do have the old one there17:37
UsLyeah. Two total.17:37
gnarfaceworth a try, if you say it was fine for all this time and the only thing that changed was you updated17:38
UsLright.17:38
UsLnext time I get locked out and have to do a hard reset I'll choose the older one.17:39
gnarfacei wouldn't rule out the power supply as suspect completely, but usually when they're getting weak you see problems powering up, first17:40
UsLand now tty1-6 magically works again..17:41
gnarfaceit'll often do stuff like just hang before POST the moment the cdrom starts to spin up or something like that, when the power supply is failing17:41
UsLI haven't noticed anything of that kind so far.17:42
UsLI think your kernel idea is the bast candidate17:42
UsLor best even17:43
UsLI'll monitor and choose the other kernel when lockup happens again.17:43
gnarfacectrl+alt+backspace to kill X has been disabled by default, perhaps you could re-enable it and get some slightly better recovery path17:44
UsLright, that's a good idea.17:45
tpefreedomDoes the devuan installer contain the ath9k_htc driver and the required firmware?17:48
gnarfacetpefreedom: wifi firmware?  yea it should have all the wifi firmware17:49
gnarfaceeven the non-free wifi firmware, just because that'd always been such a huge support issue for debian17:50
tpefreedomI know the main debian iso doesn't have the firmware (even though it is free softwawre, which is just what main is supposed to be.)17:50
fsmithredit's in debian main and devuan main18:39
fsmithredat least it's in sid18:40
fsmithredand it is included in the installer isos18:40
fsmithredit's not in the desktop-live isos. I'll make a note to add it in chimaera.18:43
rrqmason: try killing xfsettingsd; it's messing badly with the monitors23:46

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