I installed several times 8.7.1 LXDE and as soon as I forced Stretch on it it will boot up but will not bring up a graphic display. Attempts to revert and/or switch from LightDM to LXDM did not cure the problem. The second time I updated 8.7.1 to its latest and then tried to make the switch to Debian9. Trying to boot up with Linux 3.18 didn't have any effect. The screen flashed some colors trying to bring up the DM but it remains black afterwards.
So the third time I just reinstalled and updated 8.7.1 to its current stable state and it runs fine (slow but one heck faster than windows). I wonder if anyone else has similar problems and such problems have been reported. I tried to look through the bug maze but did not find anything. Next visit up there I will record the details of Hardware to post. 1024x768 is the max resolution it can handle and with the low memory it has, some "windows" like synaptic or firefox, when you try to move them around it seems like it takes forever, like it virtually tries to erase the picture from one pixel to draw the next. This is not a problem as there is nothing within the system worth saving, it was just an exercise to fix and backup old data from a WinXP that had become a mesh (pictures, documents, etc). I used about 8Gb of free disk to install Debian to backup the rest of the 80GB drive. This must be a 15y old machine, at least. I think it is a very early Celeron processor with about 256k video memory. Still, if Debian8 runs why does Debian9 fail? Simple upgrade from 8 to 9, nothing else changed. As soon as the update/grade finished and it is rebooted it is all black. Scraping the LXDE/lightdm/Openbox the login screen works fine and runs apt and everything else just fine. No graphic display, that's all. kAt -- "The most violent element in society is ignorance" rEG
