[SOLVED] Freedombox hangs during startup when installed from a fresh Debian buster 10 using Gnome desktop

Support
1

Hi, I’m looking for pointers on where I can start to look to figure out what’s happening. I installed a fresh Debian 10 buster and then immediately on first login executed the DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install freedombox. Everything goes ok and on completion I am able to login via the browser and setup the freedombox user with the first login secret. However when I reboot the machine, it hangs after the “starting Gdm display manager” message. At this point I can’t even ssh in. I’ve done this a couple of times, both on hardware and in a virtualbox, and my friend in a VMWare box. How we get it to work is to install the xfce window manager and then we don’t have any problems.

Any idea of why this is happening and where I can start to look to figure this out.

2

I think we simply never tested this case. Our tests of installing the freedombox package on Debian were always on debian-minimal or Debian images meant for servers.

In my opinion, a Debian machine serving a desktop environment and also acting as a FreedomBox is a legitimate use case. Will create a bug in the issue tracker.

2 Likes
3

Issue on Salsa

4

Using debian compatible user configurations may also benefit the use-case of running freedombox on a desktop machine.

5

For a while now, it has been possible to have GUIs along with freedombox package. We have lifted the security restrictions that were causing problems and implemented them differently.

2 Likes