A compatibility problem I've never seen before

General Discussion
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I have run into a problem that I haven’t been able to solve. My Optiplex Micro 750 began running slowly, so I purchased a refurbished Optiplex Micro 7050. Newer, fancy NVMe SSD, even smaller case (18x18x4 cm). Powered it up, let it install Windows11, rebooted with a bootable install disk of MODICIA OS. Installed with no difficulties, wiping out Windows. Everything worked–wifi, printers, sound, you name it.

I removed the 1T 2.5 inch drive from the older computer, slid it into the connectors, and rebooted it. MODICIA started normally. GParted showed me that the 1T drive was present and contained the 5 distros it had in the old machine. I processed Grub-Customizer (I know, I know) and rebooted the new machine. Grub’s menu showed all 6 distros (OS prober worked!) and subsequently I was able to run all 6 without problems.

I decided to de-install one of the distros to make room for Garuda, to give it some more attention. GParted wiped it out, leaving 200G or so of empty space. I created a bootable install USB of Garuda and booted it. Colorful! Started the installer, watched Calamares start, and went to offload some coffee and pour a fresh cup.

Calamares was waiting for a module–for 6 minutes it had been waiting.

Secure Boot was off. The SATA option was AHCI. There was a UEFI partition. No luck.

I have tried every setting change in the BIOS that I can find. Fedora has a different graphic, but it acted like Calamares.

Is the problem in the machine? in the BIOS? in Calamares? is there another installer I could try? I haven’t consulted any of the AI machines yet, preferring to throw the question onto the ItsFoss dissection table and let you folks show off your smarts and your experience.

The good news is that the machine works, with 5 interesting and functional distros available. Gnome Boxes works on most of them, so I can browse live ISOs almost as much as I’d like. I can manage this way for a long time, until I get the itch to try to figure it out. Thankfully, I can still walk, so I can shoulder my bag and play 9 holes any time She Who Must Be Obeyed allows.

But I’m still curious.

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Me too.
The five distros that work all came with the transferred disc,
Modicia was an install
Attempted Garuda install failed
How about you try a different install … maybe one that you know uses calamares… maybe another variety of Garuda.
You did specify an Efi partition to the installer, didnt you?
You dont have a fancy new graphics card… it is probably an inbuilt Intel.
Waiting for a module sounds like a missing driver … maybe waiting to download it and could not get to the repo?
It sounds like a Garuda issue.
I cant even guess at an answer. We have to experiment.

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Nice! I had a great no-drama experience with an Optiplex 7080 SFF recently… Straightforward Debian Trixie install (installed with MATE)… 10th Gen i5 - came with 16 GB (single DIMM) and 256 GB SATA SSD - boosted it to 28 GB RAM and installed Intel Arc 310 GPU… installed JellyFin and disabled MATE (headless server)…

Anyway - never really had issues with Dell hardware (except some servers last year with Fibre NICs that would never get “link up” when patched into a fibre switch)…

I don’t really know enough about your issue with Garuda, and @cat-man 's recent issues? Are they related? Is there something buggy in the Garuda installer? Last time I tried Garuda was on my AMD desktop - and it had issues with the installer (and it was trying to run BOTH a TTY installer, and a GUI installer - doing different things - or were they the same things? ) - it only lasted 2 days as it seem inconsistent and poor quality control. Quirky issues during install / setup don’t bode well for a daily driver in my book…

If I was going to run an Arch based distro (and not Arch itself) - I reckon Manjaro’s better, and probably CachyOS too (and/or maybe even SteamOS when/if they finally release it for everyone).

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Dont forget Artix… its a fine arch derivative.

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It’s marvelous to see your brains kick into gear. I need to find a distro that doesn’t use Calamares–I get the same results with Kubuntu, which uses Calamares. I’ll look through DistroWatch for one that uses a different installer.

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Calamares can be a finicky devil, especially if not configured properly at the Dev’s end.

I recently took a look at Kiro Arch Linux, with Xfce out of the box and Calamares installer worked brilliantly.

It is made by Erik Dubois, he made ArcoLinux originally, then took a break from developing for a while and came back with Kiro. Not only has he got Xfce Environment, but a total of thirteen other Environments too. All of them are available after installing the main Xfce. Link below.

Kiro

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AntiX and MX use the graphic Gazelle installer.
Devuan uses the graphic Refracta installer , plus the Debian text installer.
Try one of those.
Do you really think it is an installer fault? … that would be interesting

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Cachyos also use Calamares installer as Garuda and i can use cachyos but not garuda so im not sure its that.

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See calamares-installation.log in /var/log
I think this must mean in the live distro… I dont see how it could be in the installed copy
So it will only be there until you logout, because it cant write it to the usb drive.

So if calamares hangs open a terminal in the live distro and look at its logfile.

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I know this does not help but at least it is a known issue. I found this;
“Calamares freezing at “waiting for module” is a known symptom when the installer is unable to correctly probe disks, partitions, or UEFI NVRAM entries. This is documented in Calamares issue discussions and troubleshooting guides.”

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