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After today's apt-upgrade of my Debian testing system I cannot start an (Xorg) x-session any more on a machine with Intel HD graphics and using the modesetting driver (the classic i915 does not work either).

For testing purposes I deinstalled the display-manager and use fluxbox as window-manager (this does not seem to be the issue either, same result with xfce4 or openbox).

I do not see any error ('EE') in /var/log/Xorg.0.log, a manually run startx terminates without error (Server terminated successfully), and no x-window session starts (returns to console).

The specific kernel version does not seem to matter either (I tried 6.16 as well as 6.12 and 6.6).

Here is the info on the graphics card:

#> inxi -G Graphics: Device-1: Intel Skylake GT2 [HD Graphics 520] driver: i915 v: kernel Display: unspecified server: X.org v: 1.21.1.20 driver: X: loaded: modesetting dri: iris gpu: i915 tty: 240x67 resolution: 1: 3840x2160 2: 1920x1080 API: EGL v: 1.5 drivers: iris,swrast platforms: gbm,surfaceless,device API: OpenGL v: 4.6 compat-v: 4.5 vendor: mesa v: 25.2.6-1 note: console (EGL sourced) renderer: Mesa Intel HD Graphics 520 (SKL GT2), llvmpipe (LLVM 19.1.7 256 bits) Info: Tools: api: eglinfo,glxinfo de: xfce4-display-settings x11: xdriinfo, xdpyinfo, xprop, xrandr

The fact that there are two monitors is also irrelevant (I also tested with only built-in display).

What is going on? Any hints are highly appreciated!

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OK, it turned out that the start-up mechanism did not launch any x-window-manager, while Xorg worked just fine. (I am still trying to figure out how this got lost during the debian upgrade process).

The key was to run a trace on the startup as follows:

strace startx &> stderr.txt

and then to investigate the std-err file, where one can see all the files that were scanned and found (or not) during the startup procedure. In my case this pointed to the invocation of /etc/X11/Xsession which (when I added set -x to it) showed up just before the server hangup:

... + exec xinit: connection to X server lost

instead of the expected exec fluxbox or such.

In this situation a fix is to create a file ~/.xinitrc containing the desired startup command(s), such as

exec /etc/alternatives/x-window-manager

So, no driver/graphics-card/Xorg problem at all; just a lost configuration along the upgrade path...

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