Hi all, i had sent a message to debian-laptop a few hours back, but all i've seen so far is one response (suggesting i use q4os). i'm pretty committed to using debian directly though (at least until i've tried an awful lot more things).
After installing buster, this brand new laptop of mine seems to hang on X (GDM) starting -- after briefly showing a flashing underscore char in the top left corner of the screen, it drops back to command-line output (but doesn't allow me to login). i'm booted into recovery mode right now and i've managed to get networking up and running (and installed emacs-nox and gpm, yay!) and i'm looking through /var/log/daemon.log from my failed boot last night. My assumption is that there's probably some non-free firmware package i need to install (and maybe configure?) 20 years ago or so i remember fighting with modelines entries in order to get X working, but i imagine things have changed. This machine purportedly has: AMD Ryzen™ 5 2500U Mobile Processor with Radeon™ Vega 8 Graphics If anyone has any suggestions or hints about how to proceed with troubleshooting, i'm happy to share log files, chase down documentation, install packages, edit configuration files or whatever else is needed. i could also burn an ubuntu disk and boot that live to see what i could learn from that experience (a web search seems to indicate ubuntu would install fine on this laptop, but my preference is to stick with debian). thanks so much in advance, ~e