Okay. I cannot see with this forum how to quote a message, so no quotes.
Right-click being far bottom right → thankyou, works. I was not expecting the click area to be as small.
Backported kernel → this (as expected) did indeed do the trick (along with the firmwares).
I’m now getting “GPU failed to initialize, declaring it wedged” on boot.
It’s not clear to me why, as I’ve done nothing to my knowledge which would cause this.
I got that too. After I followed the instructions @anarcat added here, replacing the files in the /lib/firmware/i915 directory with the kernel.org copies (thank you @juancnuno), rebuilding the initramfs and restarting, that went away for me.
THANKYOU!
It’s a long enough thread that I missed whatever in fact has turned out to have been written. I will look for it now.
So, addendum : getting the i915 firmware from kernel.org fixed the GPU problem.
I do wonder, where I’ve just dumped the files in there, if later updates to the firmware packages will overwrite them; but if it does, hopefully with working versions!
However, I have one other problem, also new, which is that on boot the laptop is complaining the wifi firmware failed to load - it was doing this before I added in the kernel firmware, so it’s not related to that.
The wifi actually works once I boot up.
I’ve reinstalled the wifi firmware module, but no help.
Something for tomorrow I think.
What’s curious about all this is that originally I did not have these problems.
I think the GPU et al were happy - from a stock Debian 11 + backport kernel and firmware packages.
I did something, I would say, which induced these problems.
Mm. Coming to the view the install is borked. Just checked vainfo, “unknown error”. On boot, wifi firmware not found (which was not the case originally). I consider the laptop now to be in an unknown state - something has happened, and broken things, but I have no idea what, and so no idea what the impact actually is.
I think I’m going to have to ditch the last two days solid work installing and configuring, and start again from scratch.
This was my output from vainfo. Does it match yours?
libva info: VA-API version 1.10.0
libva error: vaGetDriverNameByIndex() failed with unknown libva error, driver_name = (null)
vaInitialize failed with error code -1 (unknown libva error),exit
I installed GNOME myself to try Wayland because I couldn’t get xfce to employ two-finger right-click, and my preferred environment, Cinnamon, doesn’t let you change the compositor, that I can see.
Hopefully the rest of the group has some ideas…?
ETA: I just upgraded to the latest backported kernel (6.0.0) and am still getting that output, for what it’s worth…
Yes, that’s exactly my output.
I’m also I think not getting two-finger right-click - I never knew it was a thing, so I’ve not been trying to use it, but I did read about it a bit now I have the laptop and I’m setting it up, and nothing happens.
Well, it all turned out for the best.
I wanted to avoid manual partitioning, because it’s become a large, complex subject and I did not want to spend the time to get up to speed (it was very simple, 25 years ago).
Turns out the Debian installer looks to make poor choices when it makes partitioning choices for you - swap is set to 1 GB (I have 64 GB RAM) and the root partition set to only 30 GB (I wanted more than this).
So I’ve spent today mastering the installer - getting up to speed with manual install, encrypted partitions, LVM groups and volumes and so on.
I now have the partitioning arrangement that I actually want.
So, regarding the GPU and the video drivers.
My vainfo gives the “it’s all wrong” output.
I think the web-page (link somewhere above) which talks about Debian on the 12th Gen, and has good output, is using Bookworm - the “testing” repo for Debian.
I think they have stuff which makes it work, and I don’t know what that stuff is.
Changing subject, since this bloody forum software will not let me make another post; the Debian 11 installer appears to compute an incorrect size for the swap partition, and always sets it to 1 (one) GB.
You have to do manual, and it’s a lot of work getting up to speed to know enough to arrange partitioning for encrypted LVM.
That’s why I went for the /swapfile option. getting a proper swap set up manually was more work than I wanted to do to this machine to get Debian running, frankly.
I disagree that it is incorrect. swap is overspill for ram, and with 64 gb of ram you should never need any overspill (excluding memory leaks), so it chooses 1GB to avoid consuming masses of space on a potentially small nvme. as has always been the rule of thumb (2x your ram below $someramcapacity, ~4GB below $someramcapacity2, unnecessary over $someramcapacity2)
The fact that swap is used for hibernation on laptops appears not to come into consideration.
Memory leaks are a fundamental consideration. Firefox is particularly bad for this; and I don’t want all those unused allocations consuming actual RAM. I’m much happier with them out of the way, in swap.
Also, yes, hibernation; which is one reason why I picked the same swap as RAM.
So, I’ve been trying to make a bootable USB stick with Debian Bookworm, firstly as a means to dd backup my boot partition (which is inside an encrypted LVM), and secondly to see if vainfo is happy.
It looks currently like the Bookworm images are broken, except for netinst. When you put them on a USB stick and boot, you get th GRUB loader - not Debian!
A very recent bug was reported and fixed, which apparently led to this, but it’s not obvious to me that bug would be the cause in my case.
So I’m waiting for a while, I guess, to see if Bookworm sorts itself out; I’ve had enough writing images to USB and rebooting for now =-)
Would ventoy work for your case? If it does, it’ll save you a lot of hassle creating the USB over and over. You just have to copy over the new iso. I believe that I first heard about it on this forum. and I’d like to thank whoever noted it here, because it has worked very well for me.
In an effort to fix my vainfo, I installed intel-media-va-driver (21.1.1+dfsg1-1), both the regular and intel-media-va-driver-non-free. Now I get:
libva info: VA-API version 1.14.0
libva error: vaGetDriverNameByIndex() failed with invalid VADisplay, driver_name = (null)
vaInitialize failed with error code 3 (invalid VADisplay),exit
Does anyone get a different output when running vainfo? Is there a different driver/s I ought to install instead or in addition to that? Thank you in advance.
ETA: link, text, vainfo update.
I spent more than I would have liked trying to install Debian 11, including some attempts inspired from this thread and from Debian 11, Gen12th : Wifi working? - #9 by disposedtrolley … then luckily I found out that
https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/FrameWork/12thGen was apparently updated since @John_Grow posted it (?).
Following instructions there now works like a charm. In particular, you need a recent kernel and manual download of missing i915 firmware.
Thanks for sharing your experiences. For most people, we recommend Ubuntu 22.04 or Fedora 37 as the official recommendations.
@Pietro_Battiston how’s the system so far? I’m running Fedora 37 but I’ve had some annoying lockups lately, thinking about giving Debian a try.
After a week or so of normal use (with kernel 6.0.0-6, from backports), the system seems to work just great. Very responsive, I noticed no crashes or lockups whatsoever.
My only concern currently is that in suspend mode the laptop discharges much faster than I would have expected based on my former laptops. But I have yet to do a serious comparison with what other people posted ( e.g. Suspend on linux drains a lot of battery compared to other laptop - #26 by Matt_Hartley , Test results for standby battery use of Expansion Cards ) in order to find out if the OS is somehow to blame (or maybe the expansion cards). I will maybe do a test of Ubuntu 22.04 to see if it fares better.
By the way, the only other very minor annoyance I had was the somehow distracting automatic brightness regulation, but it can be easily disabled: "auto-brightness" aka ambient light sensor in Linux? Details? - #5 by devnull
Also make sure you have the latest beta BIOS.