Hello!
Yesterday I upgraded my old Debian VirtualBox VM from Debian 9 stretch to Debian 10 buster.
After going through all the usual upgrade steps from the official documentation and rebooting, I found myself waiting for the GNOME user selection in order to log in. Except that it was stuck with the gray background and nothing except the mouse cursor was showing up or working.
I switched to a text-only terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F5) and logged in via command line. Looking at /var/log/syslog I found the following messages repeating over and over:
gnome-shell[1281]: Failed to set CRTC mode 1448x953: Invalid argument
kernel: [ 192.917346] [drm:drm_crtc_helper_set_config [drm_kms_helper]] ERROR failed to set mode on [CRTC:29:crtc-0]
1448x953 is the resolution I am using for the VM.
This current VM was created back when Debian 7 wheezy was still current, and I knew that a more recently created VM (originally with Debian 9 stretch) was working fine after upgrading to 10, so I figured that the info about the resolution from gnome-shell might have something to do with the VM's settings.
Sure enough, I found out that there were about a handful of settings that were different, most likely because over time VirtualBox defaulted to slightly different settings depending on my hardware, the template for the OS I selected (different Debian major releases) and the VirtualBox release itself. A couple of VM starts and configuration changes later I narrowed the problem down to the following VM setting:
Display => Screen => Video Memory
I raised the original 12 MB to 16 MB and thankfully the next boot showed the GNOME login mask as per usual!
Surely this is a very edge case kind of scenario, but I am hoping that this might help you in case you come across the same problem. All the other search results I found regarding roughly the same error message in the logs were about different things.
Thanks for reading!
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Hi!
After doing a couple of updates on my servers today, I noticed that one of them had syntax highlighting in vim disabled. I double-checked to see that it was still vim that was installed, and not vi. Indeed it was, so I tried entering a couple of vim commands in order to re-enable syntax highlighting.
A couple of minutes of trying and searching the Internet went by till I got the idea to directly compare the vim version info both on one of my servers that had it working properly and the one that didn't. It turned out that even though it was the same version number and build with the same compile time it had a certain difference: one line said "Tiny version without GUI." vs. "Huge version without GUI.". The tiny version was the one that wasn't highlighting correctly.
So I checked out what the package manager thought of this:
# yum list *vim*
[...]
Installed Packages
vim-common.i386 2:7.0.109-7.el5 installed
vim-enhanced.i386 2:7.0.109-7.el5 installed
vim-minimal.i386 2:7.0.109-7.el5 installed
Available Packages
vim-X11.i386 2:7.0.109-7.el5 base
Somehow during updating it had apparently decided to install the vim-minimal package as well. And of course it wasn't installed on the server on which vim worked as it should.
Fair enough. I thought to myself that removing should fix it, but when I tried to it said the following:
# yum remove vim-minimal
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Setting up Remove Process
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package vim-minimal.i386 2:7.0.109-7.el5 set to be erased
--> Processing Dependency: vim-minimal for package: sudo
--> Running transaction check
---> Package sudo.i386 0:1.7.2p1-13.el5 set to be erased
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
Dependencies Resolved
============================================================================================================
Package Arch Version Repository Size
============================================================================================================
Removing:
vim-minimal i386 2:7.0.109-7.el5 installed 581 k
Removing for dependencies:
sudo i386 1.7.2p1-13.el5 installed 861 k
Transaction Summary
============================================================================================================
Remove 2 Package(s)
Reinstall 0 Package(s)
Downgrade 0 Package(s)
Is this ok [y/N]:
That was weird. It felt the need to remove sudo along with it. Of course that was not okay for me, so I tried looking for a parameter for vim in order to ignore the dependencies, but apparently there are none (any more).
The solution I found after a couple of more minutes of searching the Internet was to remove the package via the actual rpm program. But don't you need the original rpm file for vim-minimal? No, you don't!
First you have to find out the complete package name, however. That can be done like this:
# rpm -qa | grep vim-minimal
vim-minimal-7.0.109-7.el5.i386
And finally just use the following command:
# rpm -e --nodeps vim-minimal-7.0.109-7.el5.i386
whereas the last parameter is of course the proper name of the package in question. --nodeps, as you might have figured already, stands for "no dependencies" and removes the package without any questions asked.
In the end, these simple steps restored the syntax highlighting functionality for my vim.
Let's hope that after the next update it doesn't decide to go monochrome again.
Thanks for reading!
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