It happened again. Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and Ctrl-Alt-F1/F2/etc had no effect. This time, the pointer was moving across the desktop when it froze, too. Not on a menu. So my guess that something in the menuing system was the cause seems to be wrong. It's got to be deep in the video driver stack.

One thing that was different this time, thought, is that I had just downloaded updates and a couple of them were related to X. Dunno what the fixes were supposed to be. Maybe someone with better knowledge of where to look up recent patches can check on that. Since I had not rebooted/restarted X, that is probably a potential source of problems.

So, I did restart it after having to use the hard power switch, and fiddled with it a bit. Had also just installed Chromium, which does not complain about the missing keyring with Cinnamon, since the keyring is present. It was nice to use another open source browser for a bit.

Since this happened yesterday, I'm sure some of the logs will be archived and new ones started when I boot it again. Which logs shall I post to pastebin for an analysis?

Yes, the driver listed is i915. Besides video, that Atom processor is acting as subsystem for most of the motherboard, PCI controller, audio, USB and various other functions seem to have been assigned to at least an Atom processor. I wonder how many there are and whether they are embedded in the CPU or the motherboard chip-set?

The logs aren't very large yet, since this is such a new system, but I really don't know what to look for. Grep for "Warning"? Or "Error"? Or something else?

OK, I can get the OpenVPN client to connect with "openvpn --config [filename]" where [filename] is the Windows config file with a little bit of editing to change the client key name. Gotta have different keys for different clients. It works, but I'm stuck with an open terminal window while it's running. How can I transfer the settings in the config file to a Network Manager profile that will just add a line in the Network Connections panel?

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series Graphics & Display (rev 0e)
    Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series Graphics & Display

Apparently the Atom architecture has been embedded in certain Pentium lines to serve as video controller...

aptitude search microcode
i A amd64-microcode                 - Processor microcode firmware for AMD CPUs
i A intel-microcode                 - Processor microcode firmware for Intel CPU
p   microcode.ctl                   - Intel IA32/IA64 CPU Microcode Utility

Now why would both AMD and Intel microcode be installed?

Also, how would I go about removing the xserver-xorg-video-intel part of X?
And how would I put it BACK if that turns out to be worse?

But sometimes the GUI helps you figure out what is going on when you don't understand what you are doing. The wiki only tells you how to run it manually, and suggests you use the GUI without explaining how to do that. Presumably, most of us want to run a VPN without having to have an open terminal on the taskbar all the time, so you would think they would be more verbose explaining about the Network Manager route.

Anyway,  I finally realized that Network Manager creates a VPN connection like any other, by 'adding' with the "+" button. There isn't an obvious 'VPN' addition to the main window, only further down in the menus. The names in the GUI don't fully correspond to the names in the  text config, so I had to guess about some things. But even after finishing an OpenVPN connection and clicking 'save' there still isn't a config file in the openvpn directory, so I still don't know where the data is and cannot yet fix any mistakes directly. So the GUI wasn't much help this time. Since I'm getting tired and annoyed today, I guess I'll have to work on it some more tomorrow.

The system is an HP 15-f272wm, just about 5 years old. I got it second-hand, didn't actually buy it myself. It's got a 4-core Pentium N3540 CPU and an Atom Z36xxx GPU. I didn't even know it had a GPU until I installed Devuan with Cinnamon and the System Info panel told me. It was originally 4 GB of RAM, but I upgraded it to 8 GB trying to improve the performance of Wind'ohs.

Poking around in the BIOS again, I find there is a setting specifically for secure boot, which I had disabled. But it still wouldn't boot until I enabled legacy support, so I guess I chose MBR when I installed. The menus can be confusing, and I just wanted to get it running something else. Win 10 is a nightmare, spending more time 'updating' itself than I spend actually using the system. And most of the time I had spent using the system was struggling with Win 10 settings and quirks. I also enabled virtualization, which is disabled by default for some reason and I kept seeing error messages about kvm being disabled by BIOS at every boot.

Since everything 'just works' now I am reluctant to re-install just to get the UEFI/GPT. Are there any huge advantages to it? If I need to re-install at some future point, I'll remember to deliberately try GPT.

All I am wondering now is how to get OpenVPN working, so I will post a new thread in the system config forum about that.

Merely disabling wicd with this handy utility -- glad I chose sysv for my init system! -- does not work. I get error messages about the GUI not working until the daemon is restarted. So I just used 'aptitude remove wicd'. Bluetooth is OK with being disabled this way.

Googling around, I learned that putting "acpi_enforce_resources=lax" on my GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT= line allows more sensors to be seen. The sensor actually named cpu fan is still not showing any data, but six others are now visible to Gkrellm and three of them show actual live data. Now if I could just figure out which is which...

Hey, I just installed 3.1 yesterday from the devuan_beowulf_3.1.0_amd64-desktop.iso rather than a net install. Since it's so new, there isn't much to download to be up-to-date. But since this has kicked off a discussion of new install issues, I'll post here.

Over-all the install was very smooth, which is indeed 'cool'... Most things 'just work', but there were some glitches. Current gripes:

* multiple desktops on the same system:
Since I have been avoiding KDE and Gnome like the plague since their respective 4.x bloat disasters, I wanted to see what MATE and Cinnamon were like. XFCE is my favorite desktop right now, so I like that it is default in Devuan. But if KDE and Gnome can go insane, who knows if XFCE might also? Though I haven't had time to experiment with them yet, I'm still configuring XFCE to my preferred state, I noticed something odd after installing all three. Some of the component accessories, like gnome terminal and the Pluma editor, have 'bled through' into my XFCE install, popping up by default instead of the XFCE equivalents. Shouldn't the elements of the different desktop systems be kept together, and separate from each other, by default? Seems kinda sloppy to have these parts appearing in XFCE.

* Network manager and WICD and Bluetooth?

This is a desktop with no bluetooth or Wifi devices attached. Why would I get WICD and Bluetooth just automatically added to my system? I'm considering uninstalling them, but am a bit concerned that there might be some sort of tangled dependency that pulled them in. So these do more than just service external devices that I do not have?

* sensors and gkrellm
This is always a problem with every new install. Some of the hardware sensors work, some do not. Even after running sensors-detect. I've got all the temp sensors working, even the HD with the hddtemp daemon. But the fan sensors do not work, and they did work in ascii. But it's now been so long that I don't recall what I did, if anything special, to get the fan sensors working. Weirdly, the entries for both the cpu and gpu fan are there in the fan sector, but if I check them there is no readout. So something is 'partially' working in that it thinks there are sensors but can't read them.

* gkrellweather
This is not fixed in beowulf. The script now works, so they have at least updated that for the new location of the NOAA weather data. But the default location of that script in the config file is still wrong. I had to edit and change "/usr/local/share/gkrellm/GrabWeather" to "/usr/share/gkrellm/GrabWeather" and will have to do that again if I ever change the config because it will still write that wrong location when it re-writes the file. Why couldn't someone fix this very simple thing?

* stubby
One of my major motivations for upgrading to beowulf was that stubby was finally available by default and I could just install DNS-over-TLS cleanly and quickly. It seems to work, but I don't know how to verify that. How do you test that your system is using TLS to connect to the DNS providers?

Since I'm just getting started, there will probably be more discoveries. But these are the current outstanding issues.

Where is the torrent for this? When I try to find a torrent for Devuan Beowulf I can only find the old one for 3.0, not this current one.

OK, I listened to another video from twitch successfully, meaning it download only the audio. But then I tried a different video on a different day and it downloaded the video, too. I can't find why it works like I want at some times and not at others! There has got to be a setting somewhere....

Hrm, both of these laptops are much newer than 2007. They date from 2011-2012 or so. By that standard, they should work with the DDX driver. But they don't. It still sounds like there is a config problem at a very deep  level. They have not accounted for laptops properly.