[SOLVED]fun issues with display manager/ctrl-altf1 in devuan

[fig1]

background: playing with gnu/linux for over a decade, running devuan for > 1/2 a year.

ive done these:

* installed devuan stable (3.x kernel,) no problem
* installed devuan testing (4.x kernel,) no problem
* dist-upgraded debian jessie to devuan jessie (then ascii) no problem
im running several devuan systems without this issue, but one install in the past 24 hours is doing this weird thing:

* display manager opens
* login goes to x
* ctrl-alt-f1 (f2, f3, f4...) doesnt go to console

throughout, sysv on pid 1, not systemd. ive tried removing/adding various systemd components, it changes nothing.

i have two systems running devuan ascii. this is only on one of them.

it did the same thing before the dist-upgrade to ascii.

it was installed from the original valentine iso, like most of the systems ive installed.

but thats not the weird part! instead of going to console, it goes to the display manager login. ctrl-alt-f1? display manager. ctrl-alt-f2? display manager.

chvt and even pm-suspend *also* go to the display manager. and rather than logging me into a second instance of x, it closes (crashes? it happens too smoothly to be sure) x. everything that might change or clear the screen (except dpms, thats fine) goes back to login.

im sure the team will fix, and i doubt anyone else has seen this. searches for similar issue across distros? nothing relevant.

why document? except for finding systemd itself after a few days of strangeness after the upgrade from wheezy to (then) debian testing, this is the weirdest bug in gnu/linux ive seen. swapping out lightdm with slim in jessie (and slim with lightdm again, in ascii) didnt change it either.

[fig1]

chances to update come from time to time; the first set of updates didnt fix it, but later updates did.

unrelated to the thread: i setup another system with devuan jessie, then upgraded to ascii. but i pinned cups and a couple other things, to keep the dist-upgrade from touching it.

as a result, i have a devuan ASCII system with cups working. its not mixing jessie and ascii in sources.list (i never do that) but it wont upgrade cups until i tell it to.

it was fun doing a partial (most of a) dist-upgrade.

[dzz]

upgraded to ascii. but i pinned cups and a couple other things, to keep the dist-upgrade from touching it

In case you didn't know, Debian Testing has cups* 2.1.0-5 but (not far behind) http://angband.pl/debian/ has cups* 2.1.0-4.0nosystemd1_amd64.deb and quite a few other builds for jessie/ascii/ceres not yet in "official" Devuan.

[fig1]

very cool, thanks.

incidentally, do you know a better command for checking what systemd packages are *installed*? its for me and another person on this board:

dpkg-query --list | grep "^ii" | grep temd

thats what i would use, but if you know one thats better or more official (?) in any way...

[fsmithred]

I think you'll see all the packages that contain systemd in the package name with your command. You might miss some if they are on hold, because the line will start with "hi" instead of "ii". But you'd probably remember if you held a systemd package.

If you want to see every file that has systemd in the name, run the following:

Code: Select all

find / -iname "*systemd*"

This will give you an idea of why there are attempts to replace udev.

Wow, I almost forgot the first reason I wanted to reply. AFAICT, getting to console in jessie (debian or devuan) is a clusterfuck of inconsistencies, between which ctrl-alt-F-key gets you where, and whether or not to use nomodeset in the boot command. I just keep trying key combinations until I get what I want. It's not the same on every installation. And I think some behaviors may have changed between when jessie was in testing and when it reached stable. That seems to be true of a bunch of things, not just getting to console.

[cynwulf]

It doesn't sound like switching consoles and from consoles to X is broken as such. More likely it's KMS console framebuffer related. Could do with knowing more about the hardware, if you still want to try and resolve it?