Fix GNOME GUI Login After Upgrade to Debian 10 Buster (VirtualBox VM)
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!
Disable Autoplay For Videos in Firefox 63
Hi!
Just after updating to Mozilla Firefox 63 (on Windows), I found that my setting to disable autoplaying media / videos was no longer effective - at least for HTML5 videos.
Apparently one of the changes for this release was to include an autoplay video blocker, but I could not find anything definitive about this in the settings.
I decided to disable autoplay for all videos (which is my preferred setting anyway) once again by doing the following:
- Open the config editor by entering about:config in the navigation bar.
- Enter the "autoplay" as a filter.
- Find the entry "media.autoplay.default", double-click it and set it to "1" to disable media autoplay browser-wide.
I just left the old setting "media.autoplay.enabled" as "false", even though it does not seem to be relevant any more.
After reloading the website with the video (in this case YouTube), once more it showed the play icon on top of the video instead automatically starting playback.
I hope this was helpful.
Thanks for reading!