@nevj @kovacslt Thank you both so much for your response. It is very much appreciated. The Debian 12 âBookwormâ stable install is very much new and it was very difficult to achieve on this legacy system, which is a Dell Precision Tower 7910. Everywhere on the Internet it states to disenable secure boot prior to install. But, on this commercial grade Dell server, disenabling secure boot, is and was, anathema. Eventually, a hard reset was required to progress the matter, as the RAM has to be reset as well. I am somewhat techy and so, was also somewhat ashamed, that I had so many protracted issues doing a Debian install. Due to this, I donât want to go though the labour of reinstalling just yet, given the considerable endeavour it took to achieve it.
I stupidly have not got to establishing a backup system yet. I am so very foolish. I should have just have taken a tarball and stashed it, in lieu of a proper backup system. A proper backup system was on the near-immediate TODO. But, obviously, not soon enough. I will not forget this learning in future.
Fortuitously, I was sshing into my Dell server, as standard, from my tablet, instead of working on it physically, directly, as I have come to favour the tactile nature of the touchscreen: I love Termux and it means that I am not desk-bound. I tried it and I still had access and was not blocked by the tty login which would not accept my username and password. I deleted those recently installed apps. I ripped them out at the roots. I also deleted the good klipper binary on my system as well, a casualty of war, due to being a bit impassioned and over-zealous to get that shite off my system. I fixed it after some fiddling and got the good binary back. The mischevious installs have wreaked havoc. One of my drivers, the FOSS driver for my graphics card was compromised as well as a result. I donât even know this could happen!
I took the initiative to re-install the Nvidia proprietary graphics driver from the Debian 12 repository, to replace the FOSS driver installed by the initial Debian install and after some fiddling and tweaking, I got it to work. I value the performance improvement as I am intending to run and tune LLMs locally, otherwise I would reinstall the FOSS driver. Ideologically, I favour FOSS, but I am a FOSS pragmatist. If a proprietary driver is better for my usecase, I will not abstain.
I have not got the Debian graphical splash login working again yet, nor accessed any of the graphical environments, but the tty does now accept my username and password, which is a win. I installed Cinnamon in case GNOME and KDE-Plasma are compromised. There is still more to do. It is a mixed blessing, but it is really forcing me to get under-the-hood and apprise myself of the inner workings of the system and its reporting and logging and that can only be a good thing. I will write more later about what I have progressed and resolved and post any queries I have not been able to resolve by my own research and endeavour. I am still mid affray.
