Bug#1061595: Debian Live 12.4.0 AMD64 Xfce Fails to Start Its Graphical Environment

[Professor Jeebs]

Thank you Johnathan / Steve,

It is working. Please feel free to close the bug report!

Turns out that it was either failing hardware (an old-ish HP laptop I am
becoming acquainted with for a family member), or more likely a failing
USB stick, with the definite possibility of a mix of both, though the
RAM in here seems fine :)

Your suggestions were perfect. This is why I love Debian and its
community. Technical excellence, and friendly-quick non-AI responses. I
admit I had already tried the suggestions, then wrote the bug report
from memory later that night. Please excuse the minor typos.

Summary of what was done, if it may help another person in the future:

After writing, `sync`. Then, `udisks2 power-off --block-device
`. And, even, replugging the stick, checking `head -c
 | sha512sum`, just to make sure it matched the signed and
verified checksum of the Debian Live Xfce image that was originally
downloaded. All of that checked out perfectly. So, it did throw me off
with the weird results I was observing. Besides the fail-safe kernel
panic, I was also occasionally receiving squashfs errors that went
previously unmentioned.

Whatever was, or is, wrong seems to be on my end.

More:

USB stick is a 16GB MOSDART, and instead of simply zeroing out its
original contents, I ran a `shred -n 1 /dev/xxx` on it... I know. Bad
for a solid state medium. I also have had no previous experience with
this brand. I am reasonably sure the problem has nothing to do with the
brand of pendrive, but compatibility can be a funny thing sometimes.

Thanks Again,

Professor Jeebs

Bug#1061595: Debian Live 12.4.0 AMD64 Xfce Fails to Start Its Graphical Environment

[Jonathan Carter]

I couldn't reproduce the xfce issue, it started just fine on a Dell 
Optiplex 7010. Did you run sync after the dd completed?

Bug#1061595: Debian Live 12.4.0 AMD64 Xfce Fails to Start Its Graphical Environment

[Professor Jeebs]

Package: debian-live
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: je...@tuta.io


Dear Debian Live Maintainers,

Today, I have attempted to boot debian-live-12.4.0-amd64-xfce.iso, after
`dd`ing it to a USB stick, and I failed miserably :(

Grub functioned without any problems, and the Live Environment booted.
However, the lightdm.service encountered errors, I believe to be related
to the package accountservices perhaps not being installed (I neglected
to check). It appears to be a mere suggested package in the log at link
[1], where maybe another package in the system should instead be marked
to depend or recommend the accountservices package--That, or perhaps it
should be manually installed.

An X display attempted to take over tty7, recurring in a loop, but then
eventually failed, and the output of `systemctl status lightdm.server`
gave more information pointing to accountservices, as in link [2]. Plain
`startxfce` and `startx` did not do the trick either. I was out of
ideas.

Aside from that, I was able to change to tty[1-6]s and browse some logs,
and perhaps could have ended up with a working system using the
wireless-tools package. However, at this point, I was not connected to
any networks (on purpose). .xsession-errors were spewed out, but Xorg
logs did not note anything strange (no lines with EE, indicating errors,
and maybe one or two WW which appeared unrelated to the problem
at-hand).

[1] 
https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/debian-live-12.4.0-amd64-xfce.iso.log

[2] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=186550

Is this happening on your machines?

Thanks! If this is a simple package installation to fix, I hope it can
be out before the next dot-release. Debian rocks, as always :)


A little more information:

UEFI, Secure Boot enabled.

Oddly, booting in failsafe mode, the kernel encountered a panic! I did
not note it nor troubleshoot it any further. I almost chalked it up to a
bad USB pendrive.

The debian-live-12.4.0-amd64-cinnamon.iso, `dd`d in the same manner as
the xfce version, booted up its graphical environment without any
issues, therefor I believe I can rule out the pendrive being bad.

I may be able to help troubleshoot this some more if it can not be
triaged / reproduced. Just let me know!