`dmidecode | grep -A8 ‘^System Information’`

tells me that the Manufacturer is HP and Product Name is OMEN Transcend Gaming Laptop 14-fb0xxx

I’m provisioning a new piece of hardware for my eng consultant and it’s proving more difficult than I expected. I must admit guilt for some of this difficulty. Instead of installing using the debian installer on my keychain, I dd’d the pv block device of the 16 inch 2023 version onto the partition set aside from it. I then rebooted into rescue mode and cleaned up the grub config, corrected the EFI boot partition’s path in /etc/fstab, ran the grub installer from the rescue menu, and rebooted.

On the initial boot of the system, X or Wayland or whatever is supposed to be talking to this vast array of GPU hardware in this device, it’s unable to do more than create a black screen on vt1. It’s easy enough to switch to vt2 and get a shell on the installed system. So I’m doing that and investigating what’s changed in Trixie. It seems like it’s pretty significant. Did they just throw out Keith Packard’s and Behdad Esfahbod’s work on font rendering? I don’t understand what’s happening in this effort to abstract to a simpler interface. I’ll probably end up reading more about it.

In an effort to have Debian re-configure the system for Desktop use, I have uninstalled as many packages as I could find that were in the display and human interface category, or were firmware/drivers for devices not present in this Laptop’s SoC. Some commands I used to clear these packages and re-install connamon follow:

```
dpkg -S /etc/X11
dpkg -S /usr/lib/firmware
apt-get purge $(dpkg -l | grep -i \
  -e gnome -e gtk -e x11-common -e xfonts- -e libvdpau -e dbus-user-session -e gpg-agent \
  -e bluez -e colord -e cups -e fonts -e drm -e xf86 -e mesa -e nouveau -e cinnamon \
  -e avahi -e gdk -e pixel -e desktop -e libreoffice -e x11 -e wayland -e xorg \
  -e firmware-nvidia-graphics -e firmware-amd-graphics -e firmware-mediatek -e firmware-realtek \
  | awk '{print $2}')
apt-get autoremove
apt-get purge $(dpkg -l | grep '^r' | awk '{print $2}')
tasksel install cinnamon-desktop
```

And then I rebooted. When it came back up, I was greeted with a login prompt, and Trixie looks to be fully functional on this device, including the attached wifi radio, tethering to my android, and the thunderbolt-attached Marvell SFP+ enclosure.

I’m also installing libvirt and fetched the DVD iso material for Debian, Ubuntu and Rocky in case we have a need of building VMs during the development process. These are the platforms that I target at work with gcp Dataproc, so I’m pretty good at performing maintenance operation on them at this point.