I can't really answer your questions, but thought to mention that I tend to use xrandr for changing brighness, eg

$ xrandr --output eDP-1 --gamma 1:0.8:0.7 --brightness 0.7

(The simultaneous gamma adjustment suits my display)

Use xrandr without arguments to work out the name(s) of your monitor(s). And of course, man xrandr for details.

With pulseaudio there's more fun, because it infuses itself onto the sound system by on the one hand adding a software module to replace the default alsa module at the low level, and it also adds a higher level replacement for the "default" audio path.

Forget about ~/.asoundrc since card 0 is the correct default card.

This means in particular that it adds an audio control level in between alsa and actual output.

So you may well need to install  pavucontrol-qt as well, as way of manipulating its controls. That GUI will then attempt to operate the alsa controls as well, with a good amount of potential for confusion.

With those control knobs, and those of qasmixer, you should hopefully be able to unmute whatever is muted and raise the volume on whatever is needed.

As an additional: if your pulseaudio sub system is not started you would start it with:

$ pulseaudio --start

Edit: spelling correction (thanks)

First, check with aplay -l which "hardware devices" there are (for sound).

Then check with aplay -L | grep -A2 default what the "default" is tied to.

Sometimes that is wrong since "alsa" on installation binds blindly its "default" to card 0. Then it might work by telling "alsa" to use another card, eg card 1. One method for that is to add a ~/.asoundrc file with three lines:

defaults.ctl.card 1
defaults.pcm.card 1
defaults.timer.card 1

If you haven't done so, you might also want to install qasmixer for a bit of visual view and control of sound. It might be a help if it's a question of low volumes or muted controls.

Don't cp or dd work?

I.e. just copy the iso file to the device /dev/mmcblk0 or /dev/sdc or whatever it comes up as (tail /var/log/sys usually tells that)

Is that a QA or HR question?

The support team sends their Thanks for the intended heads-up (even though they managed to get their shit together on their own this time).

Or maybe you could send me (or someone else) the email address you want to have in your profile, and I/them will make it happen.

Good place for comprehensive reports. The ISO build team sends its "thanks!".

I don't know much about this, but my first guess would be that X is actually started via the Xorg.wrap program, which has its configuration file at /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config, and this has a line

allowed_users=console

that probably should be different.

My suggestion comes from the shallow investigation:

find /usr -perm /u=s

followed by some guess work, which made me look at man Xorg.wrap.

HTH

That same thing happens for me with the (forthcoming) beowulf installation on qemu, but this recovers by using ctrl-alt-f2 for an alternate login. Maybe it's the same for you?

@Eaglet,
you might want to read man hwclock more carefullly, and then pay special attention to the documentation of the --show option, which clearly states, in so many words:

The options --utc and --localtime are for you to tell about time basis of your clock. The program then presents the clock reading in ISO 8601 format local time with respect to that basis.

Thanks @Head_on_a_Stick.

Yes, it would be nice to have a built-in option. As is, one has to resort to manual output filtering, e.g. by adding

 | sed "/^  /{s/\\b /\n  /g}"

to the command. That merely "pretty-prints" and doesn't provide the version details.