On Fri, Mar 26, 2021 at 02:07:26PM -0500, Doug Windle wrote: > I have new in box Dell R440 that I am trying to install Debian 10.7.0. The > install process of Debian goes fine until after reboot. After the OS > install and upon reboot/startup of OS with GNOME I get a tearing/scrambling > of the local display. The local display works fine thru the startup of the > Dell hardware (I get the Dell splash screen with boot up options and > progress bar) and thru the installation process and only fails after the OS > starts.
Issues with video chipset drivers/firmware are extremely common, especially if one installed with the "official" images, rather than the "unofficial" ones which contain non-free firmware. Start by identifying your video chipset. Use lspci -nn for this, because it gives you the 8-digit PCI ID number (e.g. [8086:5912]). You can often google for that ID number, together with keywords like "debian" or "linux", to get an installation report from someone else who has used similar hardware. Also see whether the kernel is trying to load firmware, and not finding it. dmesg | grep -i firmware should give you the exact filenames of any firmware files that are missing. You can use apt-file or packages.debian.org to track down which package(s) contain those files. Install the packages, and reboot. (You may need to add contrib non-free to your sources.list, and apt update.) If installing firmware doesn't solve the problem, then you might need some kind of nvidia driver. There are instructions for nvidia chipsets on the wiki. Or you can just post here with your chipset info (just copy the whole line from lspci -nn) and someone will probably know what to do with it.
