Re: no graphics for Debian buster on Dell Inspiron

On 16/11/19 23:08, eric wrote:
> On 11/16/19 9:22 AM, Matteo Semplice wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> after nearly 20 years of happiness with Debian distros I am 
>> struggling to get Debian buster working on a Dell Inspiron 14 2-in-1.
>>
>> The installer completes, but I have no working wifi and no working 
>> graphics.
>>
>> Let's concentrate on the graphics for now, since it is more urgent. 
>> The laptop has an i7-10510U which should come with an embedded UHD 
>> 620 graphics and also a discrete nVidia MX230 GPU. I have tried 
>> following different ideas found on the web but with no luck. My guess 
>> is that the embedded graphics is not recognized by the driver and 
>> that MX230 does not work with nouveau, but here are some details. The 
>> following tests have been done on a fresh install (kde task selected 
>> in the installer with only firmware-nonfree, firmware-iwlwifi added 
>> afterwards).
>>
>> [...]
On a side note, I have tried to upgrade the kernel to the 5.2 in 
buster-backports but both bop.2 and bop.3 packages result in unbootable 
kernels: the boot process just hangs somewhere. I have uninstalled them, 
but if you think that a newer kernel may help I can try to reinstall and 
boot it without the quiet option to see what goes wrong.
>>
>> Thanks in advance for any suggestion.
>>
>> Best
>>
>> ?????? Matteo
>>
>
> I have little experience in this regard but do have a cybertron laptop 
> with the hybrid intel/nvidia graphics.
>
> There is a lot of confusing information on the web.?? I would start 
> with blacklisting the nouveau driver and removing all the nvidia 
> drivers to see if you can get just the intel graphics to work.
>
> Regards,
>
> Eric
>
Hi,

 ??thanks for the tip! You've put me in the right direction and I've also 
done further research: in the end it seems that it is the i7-10510U cpu 
that is not yet fully supported.

At present, I can boot 5.2 and 5.3 kernels from buster-backports and sid 
provided that I blacklist the intel_lpss_pci and the nouveau module. 
(After boot I have tried to modprobe nouveau and it seems ok, but I have 
not tested much as for now I just need to have the machine up and 
running with just any graphics user interface).

It's not clear to me if better support for my Comet Lake i7-10510U will 
be granted by the same Ice Lake patches expected in kernel 5.4 or not, 
but I guess that I just need to wait few more days.

For reference, I just report here the link to this reddit about 
installing on XPS 13 (which has an Ice Lake cpu)

https://old.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/cx0fkc/xps_13_2_in_1_7390_linux_boot_attempt/

I have taken from there the idea to blacklist the lpss driver; I'll test 
some of the other tips given there and report back.

Regards,

 ?????? Matteo