On Sun, 28 Mar 2021 at 16:51, Ludovic Bellière
<belliere.ludovic@???> wrote:
>
> Hi Steve,
>
> It's most likely a debian issue. And to be more precise, a Xorg that
> may not be up to date. I would advise you to check devuan's Xorg
> version and check if the firmware of your laptop is talked about on the
> internet. Ubuntu likely uses a more recent version of Xorg than debian,
> or any other library that enable discovery of your display.
>
> All in all, a display doesn't seem to have to do anything with init
> freedom. Would it?
>
> Ludovic
>
> On Sun, 14 Mar 2021 16:34:25 +0000
> Steve Scott via Dng <dng@???> wrote:
>

> > Greetings all,
> >     I've been a long time Devuan user, and have donated to the
> > project because I would very much like to see it continue. I recently
> > was forced to upgrade my laptop, having completely destroyed my old
> > one, and upon installation (dual boot) of Beowulf 3.1.0 and reboot,
> > was dropped into a shell prompt, no graphics. LSPCI revealed only 2
> > devices were actually identified, the others merely providing
> > vendor/device ID information, including the NVIDIA gfx device.
> > dmidecode provided plenty of information however. I was able to
> > install the driver from the vendor and get CUDA working, but was
> > never able to get Xorg to recognize the display.

> >
> > Since a desktop was pretty critical to my needs for this machine, I
> > gave Ubuntu a shot - not that I like Ubuntu all that much, but they
> > do seem to have desktop setup polished well.
> >
> > Whadayaknow, Ubuntu pretty much discovered everything, so it appears
> > I will be living here for the time being. Happy to provide whatever
> > data you need. SWS

I would doubt it's an Xorg issue, as both Debian/Devuan and recent
Ubuntu releases use the same Xorg version. Devuan uses xorg/kernel
packages unmodified from Debian so the versions listed for beowulf and
buster will be identical, across both Devuan and Debian package
information sites.

https://pkginfo.devuan.org/cgi-bin/package-query.html?c=package&q=xserver-xorg=1:7.7+19
https://packages.debian.org/buster/xserver-xorg

You didn't mention which version of Ubuntu you tried, but for Xorg
that's irrelevant as the LTS and latest release have the same version
as Debian/Devuan.

https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/xserver-xorg
https://packages.ubuntu.com/groovy/xserver-xorg

Since it works in Ubuntu, it's unlikely to be a BIOS version issue
(although that might make a difference for older kernel versions?).

Most likely, you could try upgrading to the backports version of linux
kernel in Beowulf to see if that makes a difference. Ubuntu recent
releases have a newer kernel version than Devuan Beowulf/Debian Buster
main repository, while the beowulf-backports/buster-backports
repository has a newer kernel than the Ubuntu repository.

https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/linux-image-generic
https://packages.debian.org/buster/linux-image-amd64
https://packages.debian.org/buster-backports/linux-image-amd64

The default kernel package on beowulf amd64 is `4.19+105+deb10u9`
while beowulf-backports has `5.10.13-1~bpo10+1`