Dev1 Galaxy Forum / Hardware & System Configuration

physical monitor won't light up if VNC session active

dummy@example.com (rmrichesjr) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:35:51 +0000

A new symptom in Excalibur: When a VNC session is active, my physical (HDMI and DisplayPort) monitors won't light up (apparently meaning no signal is being sent from the GPU) in response to keyboard activity--but only if a VNC session is active. In this case, the physical monitors should be displaying a text console. The symptom has occurred with multiple kernel update versions.

Isn't it the kernel itself (perhaps the GPU driver) that should detect keyboard activity and turn on the signal to the monitor to make the text console visible? Or, is there a userspace process involved with that?

Motherboard is an Asus Pro WS X570-ACE. CPU is an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8-core. GPU chipset is Navi 14 [Radeon RS 5500/5500M / Pro 5500M]. One physical monitor is on an HDMI port via a Kopul HDMI switcher. The other physical monitor is on DisplayPort. Current kernel is 6.12.101+deb13-amd64, but symptoms happened with 1 or 2 earlier Excalibur kernels.

The system serves as a droid control ship for VNC sessions with diskless zero/thin-client display heads that boot via PXE.

Normally overnight, I push the power-off buttons on the physical monitors to save energy. At least with earlier Devuan releases, if the monitors are left on and the system tries to blank and power down the monitors, the monitors will unblank and turn on later during the night. I use "setterm --blank 0 --powerdown 0" to keep the system from trying to blank and power down the monitors.

The problematic sequence is

1. The physical monitors are powered off to save energy.

2. Someone starts one of the diskless machines and launches a VNC session.

3. I push the power buttons on the physical monitors. After showing the manufacturer's logo for several seconds, the monitors report no signal and go into standby state.

4. I tap on the keyboard to try to wake up the monitors (or keep them awake). At this point, Num Lock, Scroll Lock, and Caps Lock turn on/off the respective LEDs. As an experiment, I once logged in blindly, and the monitors did not display anything at that time.

5. Immediately after the VNC session is terminated, the monitors come out of standby state and show the results of the blind login and a couple of commands that had been done blindly.

Any suggestions for getting the GPU to send signal to the physical monitors so they will power up and display stuff?

Thanks!

[SOLVED] GRUB_TIMEOUT is being ignored

dummy@example.com (ovi) — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 17:02:53 +0000

Yeah, seems to be true regarding GPUs and LED/LCD screens. On laptop displays can be seen exactly the countdown, there is no lag in between. On my desktop with labwc configured with swayidle it takes couple of second to wake up from power save mode. I have 2 modern monitors (Lenovo Legion 24 and HP Z24n G3) and the HP usually takes about 5-6 seconds to wake-up, and sometimes is annoying. Not sure, but Wayland might also be to blame. libs wlroots are now on 0.18 on repos, but meanwhile they released 0.2 which might have some improvements in this direction. On my Laptop(a HP, 8 years old), with same software configuration, waking up the laptop's display from power save mode is almost instant. Not sure with a monitor connected, I have to try.

[SOLVED] Errors and warnings during booting

dummy@example.com (archaeon) — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 09:47:01 +0000

Hello Ron

Thank you again for the link, providing some info about the loglevels and how you can suppress unimportant messages. I just read the article. Additionally I have to say that I also read about that subject on another page yesterday.

The messages do not really bother me, as far as I know about their meaning and they are not considerable.

But you are right. Therefore it might be a good idea to give it a try. At least until some new "real" problems appear while working on my computer. Then I still could change the loglevel back to be more verbose and see what new messages pop up.
It might even turn out to be a good and precise filter.

Sporadic network failure on wakeup after hibernation

dummy@example.com (kapqa) — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:05:38 +0000

had this problem today that i nedded/wanted to install packages from devuan repository via recovery-mode
but was surprised that the recovery-mode did not find any network connection;

since i knew of this trick here, wanted to remedy via

dhclient eth0

only to find out that dhclient is not/no longer included by default (it seems even abandoned according to linked post above).

however, it would be very good if it could be included by default as paackage in devuan-netinstall and iso. to allow for exactly such situations to easily be mended.

my proposal hence to include the package that includes dhclient into devuan.iso for failsafe & debug network issues.

isc-dhcp-client

is the package in question.

thank you very much.

[SOLVED] How do I disable ssh-agent and gpg-agent from starting automatically?

dummy@example.com (tux_99) — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 21:26:34 +0000

Ok, after some extensive googling I found the solution in the end:

In the following thread on the linux.debian.user newsgroup a Debian user asked the same question 4 years ago:
https://groups.google.com/g/linux.debia … lSllKEIUVk

After lots of trial and error he finds the solution, it's XFCE starting up both ssh-agent and gpg-agent and annoyingly this is not exposed in the "Session and Startup" GUI config tool of XFCE where I had already looked, it requires using xfconf-query to disable:
https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-sessio … gpg_agents

I can confirm that running the following two commands (as indicated in the above XFCE docs link) prevents ssh-agent and gpg-agent from being started automatically by XFCE:

xfconf-query -c xfce4-session -p /startup/ssh-agent/enabled -n -t bool -s false
xfconf-query -c xfce4-session -p /startup/gpg-agent/enabled -n -t bool -s false

[SOLVED] upgrade succesful .. or not? (systemd)

dummy@example.com (GlennW) — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 03:40:44 +0000

I use nala as well, I think it works well, but there are times when I use the other package tools, but not snap or other app installers. DPKG and apt-get mostly. Nala has no reinstall switch... I like the colours. :-)

[SOLVED] LibreOffice Calc 7.4.7.2 - Slow / laggy scrolling

dummy@example.com (Altoid) — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 17:16:37 +0000

Hello:

rolfie wrote:

... download a suitable version from the repo, all files required, and install it with apt/apt-get or dpkg -i ...

Right.

rolfie wrote:

... a look at the Devuan Package View ...
... two packages in the repo, both 7.4.7-1 plus a Debian patch.
... 7.4.7-1+deb12u13 and 7.4.7-1+deb12u14.
... so you should be able to get back to deb12u13

Thank you for taking the time to look that up.
Much obliged.

In the few hours I have been working with it, I have seen that [OpenOffice] starts up, open and saves the same spreadsheet noticeably faster, does not have any (obvious) UI bugs and is working as well as expected.

Just a couple of things to get used to because "muscle memory" (eg: [BackSpace] to delete content from a cell instead of [Delete] which generates a pop-up with options) but nothing important enough to consider going back to [LibreOffice].

On top of that, I do think it has more 'nice-looking' appeal. 8^P

Best,

Huawei Freebuds

dummy@example.com (tukhalele) — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 08:14:08 +0000

Update
Was using Cinnamon DE.
Changed to KDE and they now work fine.

So it was a Cinnamon problem - not a Devuan problem.

Invalid PCI Header Signature error

dummy@example.com (Invisible_Pineapple) — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 21:51:32 +0000

Well, more investigation later, sometimes the laptop still starts normally with no problems, seems to do that more frequently now which is good. Learned that a thing called "fwupd" exists for upgrading firmware, however, it gives me an error that my EFI partition isn't set up correctly... which is strange because the laptop is running in UEFI mode. But, if I have to, I may need to reinstall the whole operating system. Even though I was getting weird graphical issues even in the installer. But, there might be another option before trying that.

Radeon HD 5770 - free driver does not detect refresh rates above 60Hz

dummy@example.com (kapqa) — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:11:15 +0000

since was boasting fruitlessly about these card,
have since remembered shis sharedware, which is very handy on the computer )macinjack(
it maybe wont crank up the refresh rate, but atleast on the monitor here (mostly legacy format) it can operate other resoltuions which are native or not native? on the panel/(monitor; which to some degree very handy since it allows to "simulate" other resoultion to see how they would fit into frame, like 2560x1600 on 22 inch etc.
butt since it not native? resoultion, it looks not that genuine.

(noi AI corrigenda=)
https://ibb.co/60vdy1Td

How to set system time?

dummy@example.com (FM81) — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 15:56:11 +0000

Did ntp need all those python-packages before too?

If I remember correct, it doesn't. I dont have any install-logs anymore, but if I do

ldd /usr/local/sbin/ntpd

ldd /usr/local/bin/ntpq

I see no dependencies to python at all.

[irony]
Seems we live in a linux world, where nothing works anymore without python (or equal complex things).
[/irony]

Best regards, FM_81

xroar running slow on Devuan

dummy@example.com (litegamer) — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 23:36:13 +0000

I have a Radeon x1250 graphics card and I am using Devuan Freia. I compiled xroar from source. Xroar is an emulator that uses sdl. The problem is xroar runs painfully slow. It runs fine when it is in a small window. But when I enlarge the window or make it full screen it is painfully slow. I tried running glxgears and it shows gears moving. I am wondering if I am missing some library that allows sdl to use graphics acceleration. Youtube videos run fine. Any suggestion would be appreciated.

LibreOffice Writer and GTK3 - heads up

dummy@example.com (Altoid) — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:50:04 +0000

Hello:

fsmithred wrote:

... need to install libreoffice-gnome ...

Seeing that I do not use [gnome-desktop], I don't think I can come up with a reason to need [libreoffice-gnome].

fsmithred wrote:

... and do not exclude Recommends to get libreoffice-gtk3 ...

Right.
Thanks for searching (and finding) the cause of this.

It would seem that someone at the [Libre Office] dependencies department is not paying attention to what they are doing.

Have a good week-end. 8^)

Best,

VirtualBox autostart

dummy@example.com (Altoid) — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 21:50:53 +0000

Hello:

Please excuse the belated reply.

greenjeans wrote:

... no number is specified the system defaults to giving it a priority of 20 ...

I see ...

greenjeans wrote:

Never used an init script for conky ...

Same here.
I use the [Session and Startup] section in XFCE.

fsmithred wrote:

I don't mess with init scripts.

Neither do I, unless something comes up.

fsmithred wrote:

... making desktop buttons to start specific virtual machines ...

If for whatever reason I have to stop / restart the headless VM running [Pi-hole], I do it from the command line.
If not, I use the VBox GUI.

Thank you both for your input.

Best,

[SOLVED] WARNING at dmesg?

dummy@example.com (deepforest) — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 23:23:28 +0000

It's a kernel warning (correcting my earlier comment: similar to, but lower severity than a true "oops") from the DRM translation table manager.
xfwm4 was terminated (by signal, but we don't know from where, could be e.g an xserver crash or a manual 'kill'), the kernel tried to release shared graphics memory buffers, then it hit an invalid opcode - likely because those buffers were in an inconsistent state.
The operation was aborted safely, thus it's a warning rather than an error

Thanks for explain Man!)
It seems happens when i manually killed xorg when monitor go "no signal"
Now i do not see that at dmesg