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!
Installing mod_cloudflare For Apache HTTPd 2.4 On Debian 8 (Jessie) Via Aptitude Repository
[Update on 2019-09-19] Warning: From Debian 9 (stretch) upwards, according to the official documentation Cloudflare has dropped support for mod_cloudflare. Instead they recommend replacing it with the new alternative: the official Apache HTTPd module mod_remoteip.
Hi!
If you are using the Cloudflare proxy functionality, you will find that your web server will end up only working with Cloudflare's IPs instead of the visitors'. After quite some time I thought that there has to be a better way to go about this, and I found mod_cloudflare, a solution officially developed by Cloudflare themselves.
When I was looking at the official Cloudflare documentation on how to install mod_cloudflare for Apache 2.4 on Debian 8 (Jessie) today, I was disappointed to find that they were only recommending manual ways: installing a .deb package or compiling the module yourself.
Luckily I found a guide on how to accomplish the installation with the standard apt-get / aptitude tool for Debian / Ubuntu.
This is how:
- Add the aptitude repository to a new sources list file, e.g. at /etc/apt/sources.list.d/cloudflare-main.list - with this content:
deb http://pkg.cloudflare.com/ jessie main
- Download the Cloudflare repository key and add it to the aptitude known keys:
# wget https://pkg.cloudflare.com/pubkey.gpg # apt-key add pubkey.gpg # rm pubkey.gpg
- Update the aptitude cache:
# aptitude update
- Look at which packages are available in the new repository:
# grep ^Package: /var/lib/apt/lists/pkg.cloudflare.com_dists_jessie_main_binary-amd64_Packages
- Install mod_cloudflare:
# aptitude install libapache2-mod-cloudflare
- Restart the Apache HTTPd service:
# service apache2 restart
Hopefully this way of installing will enable everyone to update / maintain it much more easily and with less one-time use packages installed.
Additionally, this could prove even more useful for people who want to install more Cloudflare packages.
I am confident that this method also works for Ubuntu and other versions of Debian - just replace the "jessie" part in the aptitude sources list file with your distribution major release codename (like "wheezy" for Debian 7 or "vivid" for Ubuntu 15.04).
Thanks for reading!
Original source: https://emtunc.org/blog/01/2016/installing-mod_cloudflare-ubuntu-14-04-apache-server/