I believe that I downloaded the compressed tar file from their site, unpacked it and moved the files into /usr/local/interlink and linked the binary into /usr/local/bin as described above.

Geoff

I have just downloaded the PDF manual for my ZenBook UX305FA and on page 54 it tells me that I press <F2> during POST to access the BIOS. According to this document, <F2> has a picture of an aeroplane. (I am on a different machine currently).

Geoff

I'm not sure that I understand your comments on elogind, itself. elogind runs as a daemon and is used by the display manager to do the authentication. The end user does not interact directly with elogind.

Geoff

I have also been having some fun with EFI.

My Asus ZenBook UX305FA is formatted with GPT partitions and boots with EFI.
This has been working fine for a number of years and has been upgraded and is now on Chimaera.

The only thing that I was unable to get to work was running the Xen hypervisor.
I have Xen running on my DOS partitioned desktop, when I want it, but it would not boot on this EFI laptop.
I have had it set up as a boot option via grub, but it would just hang.
I also tried setting it up to boot the Xen hypervisor directly with EFI, but that would just return immediately.

Having a look at getting Xen running, I used efibootmgr under Devuan to look at the EFI settings and also using the firmware screen, from American Megatrends.
In using the firmware screen, trying to see what was set up, I managed to swap round a couple of boot entries and then managed to swap them back!
Once booted up efibootmgr -v reported an error. After fiddling around for a while I ran

grub-install /dev/sda

to try and ensure that it would still boot. This was ok and does still boot via grub as expected.

efibootmgr (with or with "-v") now reports

efibootmgr 
No BootOrder is set; firmware will attempt recovery

However, as a side effect of all this, the grub entry for Xen now works and I am posting this with Chimaera as Dom0 under Xen.

The directory /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/ exists, but is empty.

As everything seems to be working, it is tempting to leave it alone. But where is the fun in that!
It would be nice if efibootmgr agreed with the firmware screen (what is that called, it can't be the BIOS screen, can it?)

In writing this an obvious point becomes clear. If I am running Devuan under Xen, then access to EFI stuff may be impaired. Having booted on the bare metal,

efibootmgr 
BootCurrent: 0000
Timeout: 2 seconds
BootOrder: 0000,0004,0002
Boot0000* debian
Boot0002* Hard Drive
Boot0004* zen

efibootmgr -v
BootCurrent: 0000
Timeout: 2 seconds
BootOrder: 0000,0004,0002
Boot0000* debianCould not parse device path: Invalid argument

It is interesting that it couldn't parse option 0000 as that is the one that is actually booted.

Also the directory /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/ now contains the expected stuff.

Setting up stuff seems to be easier on the firmware screen than using efibootmgr as selecting the the parts of the path to the boot image is easier when there is a choice of options rather than entering a complex command line. The first part of the path was incomprehensible to me, but there was a choice of one (disk?) and from there the options were obvious.

Yes, don't forget to run

update-grub

after you have made any changes to the grub configuration files, otherwise the changes will have no effect.

Geoff

I have tried using Runit as a process supervisor, with SysVinit as PID 1.

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=1748

I then looked at using OpenRC

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2072

and also using Runit as a process supervisor under OpenRC

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2078

although OpenRC now comes with its own supervisor.

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=9501#p9501

I have also looked at using OpenRC as PID 1, which can work well
although there is a remaining bug, although I offer a patch to
fix it.

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2788

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=3371

Geoff

Following the dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc I have now upgraded grub to the deb10u2 version and it still boots.

Geoff

Via the Debian bug report 966575 I got a message from Colin Watson saying :-

So I tried :-

debconf-show grub-pc
  grub2/update_nvram: true
  grub-pc/install_devices_failed_upgrade: true
  grub2/kfreebsd_cmdline:
  grub-pc/chainload_from_menu.lst: true
  grub-pc/kopt_extracted: false
  grub-pc/install_devices_empty: false
  grub-pc/timeout: 5
  grub-pc/mixed_legacy_and_grub2: true
  grub-pc/postrm_purge_boot_grub: false
* grub2/linux_cmdline_default: earlyprintk=vga,keep vsyscall=emulate init=/sbin/openrc-init
  grub-pc/hidden_timeout: false
  grub-pc/partition_description:
* grub-pc/install_devices: /dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD10EZRX-00A8LB0_WD-WCC1U2741701
  grub-pc/install_devices_disks_changed:
  grub2/kfreebsd_cmdline_default: quiet
  grub-pc/install_devices_failed: false
* grub2/linux_cmdline:
  grub2/device_map_regenerated:
  grub2/force_efi_extra_removable: false
  grub-pc/disk_description:

dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc

which asked 3 questions, 2 about the command line and then about where to install.
It had selected /dev/sdb and I added /dev/sda (with the spacebar) :-

 The grub-pc package is being upgraded. This menu allows you to select which devices you'd like grub-install to be automatically run for, if any.
 Running grub-install automatically is recommended in most situations, to prevent the installed GRUB core image from getting out of sync with GRUB modules or grub.cfg.
 If you're unsure which drive is designated as boot drive by your BIOS, it is often a good idea to install GRUB to all of them.
 Note: it is possible to install GRUB to partition boot records as well, and some appropriate partitions are offered here. However, this forces GRUB to use the blocklist
 mechanism, which makes it less reliable, and therefore is not recommended.
 GRUB install devices:
    [*] /dev/sda (240057 MB; Corsair_Force_GS)
    [ ] - /dev/sda5 (262 MB; /boot)
    [ ] /dev/sda6 (239685 MB; LVM PV O44JvK-Gagl-jJ0w-aWwi-3qn0-Y2no-fbwG8Q on /dev/sda6)
    [*] /dev/sdb (1000204 MB; WDC_WD10EZRX-00A8LB0)
    [ ] /dev/sdb6 (882340 MB; LVM PV p10DED-cZEt-K24W-0Ov2-itdA-HOI8-EquJNg on /dev/sdb6)
    [ ] /dev/dm-0 (21474 MB; SSD0-root)
                                                                                   <Ok>

It then continues

Installing for i386-pc platform.
Installation finished. No error reported.
Installing for i386-pc platform.
Installation finished. No error reported.
Including Xen overrides from /etc/default/grub.d/xen.cfg
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found theme: /usr/share/desktop-base/grub-themes/desktop-grub-theme/theme.txt
Found background image: Lake_mapourika_NZ.tga
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.0-9-amd64
... several kernels later ...
Found Windows 7 on /dev/sda1
Found Windows 7 on /dev/sdb1
...
Found Debian GNU/Linux jessie/sid on /dev/mapper/HDD0-xenguest1--disk
done

My system can still boot ;-) but looks as though it will now install onto both disks.

debconf-show grub-pc now reports :-

Geoff

I have fed some info into the Debian bug report.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo … bug=966575

but the deb10u2 does look like the fix and is available now on my machine, but I will wait until I hear from them in case they want any further info.

Geoff

It may be that it is related to my disk layout, where /boot is its own partition and maybe grub failed to do the grub-install correctly. When I can get to my desktop machine, I will check the output from apt to see if I missed an error message.

/boot is my only ext partition, the rest being handled by LVM, not encrypted.

Geoff

Just for the record, looking in /var/log/apt/history.log, the latest upgrade was this morning :-

So, I think that it was upgrading from the stable version to the stable-security version.

Geoff

Thank you for that, I will have a look at that.

The url for giving some grub rescue commands was :-

https://www.easytechstutorials.com/how- … -rescue-2/

Rather than the ones above!

It does sound as though the problem is quite widespread, so it may be a good idea to not do any upgrades involving grub...

Geoff