On Thu, Dec 05, 2024 at 21:03:45 -0500, nsrxnst wrote:
> my Debian install has never been ideal: the GUI is spotty, [...]
> upon selecting the appropriate option from grub, manually or automatically,
> it begins the boot process, displays errors too fast to comprehend, and the
> screen goes to a cursor, then black. repeated power button long-presses seem
> to be the only thing that brings it back to life, but only so long as I don't
> try to boot the installed os.
Since you said there's a GUI, it sounds like X (or Wayland) is trying
to start, and failing. So the first thing I'd do is boot without the
GUI.
Assuming you use GRUB (I don't know whether a "MacBook pro 2014" is an
amd64 system), you should be able to interrupt the boot sequence, press
the 'e' key to edit the boot parameters, and add
systemd.unit=multi-user.target
to the kernel parameters. I think you can also shorten this to just
2
but I haven't actually tried that.
If this gets you to a console login prompt, then you can login on the
console and try to figure out what's wrong. Everything should be
working except the GUI, unless there's file system damage.
