RaMa Hey thanks a lot for your ideas and the awesome explanations! I tried the uxa thing and now I haven't managed logging in anymore. The screen freezes as soon as I hit enter after password entry. Switching to a text console doesn't work either because my password contains an umlaut.
Just for curiosity: do you think it's likely that the machine has a hardware problem that the bios hardware check doesn't notice? I mean the machine ran fine for months until four weeks ago!
OK, let's start with logging in, in text mode with other characters
You can use left-ALT + 0xxx codes, I just tried ä (left) ALT+0228 in a password and that works from a text tty
See here: http://www.irongeek.com/alt-numpad-ascii-key-combos-and-chart.html the right column!
Can you login, in that way?
You can test the umlaut in the username field, to see if it appears and then of course type the real username
For more information about a probable cause look in the kernel log?
try: sudo journalctl -b -k --no-pager in a terminal
I tried the alt-0228 and a bunch of other methods - nothing works. But that's okay - it was a fresh test install anyway. I switched to a different machine for working, want to give this one to a friend and want him to use Solus. Now I quickly threw Ubuntu Mate on it to see what happens and so far it's fine without errors. I will let it sit there with something todo over night and tomorrow install Solus again to test your other suggestion!
and the Xorg log:
cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log
OK, good luck!
(left) alt-0228 is only for ä...
by the way, you have to input the numbers on the numeric keypad.... while holding left-alt ;-)
Uuugh the numeric keyboard, okay, that I did know about 20 years ago but had totally forgotten 
Thanks man and I will update you tomorrow!
When releasing the alt key, the character appears! That is how it should work...
Yes, that was very long ago! :-)
Good morning! I spent another hour testing this in Solus. The iommu settings don't seem to be the culprit here either. I then downloaded standard Ubuntu gnome edition and installed that - it run's fine without problems.
So because I really have to go on with other stuff I now left Ubuntu on the machine for now and will give it to him like that. The issue seems to be a bug in something, probably upstream, in Solus. It runs fine on my machine and that's most important :-))
Thanks so much for your help, it is very much appreciated!
Thank you, it was nice to meet you, Good luck!
Today I installed Solus on an ASUS i7 Chromebox, there the video behaved strange, then I switched to LTS kernel, and it worked OK
So in case of video troubles that might help too...
RaMa I didn't even know, something like an LTS kernel existed. How does one switch to it? Using an XPS 13 i5 quad core now here and it works fine except for the mouse pointer stutter problem!
You can install that via:
sudo eopkg it linux-lts
Or via software center...
Also set boot manager time-out to 3 or so, so you can choose that lts kernel at boot time in boot menu
sudo clr-boot-manager set-timeout 3
and then after reboot to automatic boot that chosen kernel
sudo clr-boot-manager update
I can confirm the problem is caused by the kernel. The newest 5.3 also leads to frequent system freezes on an ASUS UX305. The LTS kernel did, however, not work for me. The special keyboard keys (e.g. volume or brightness) didn't work. Installing 5.2.20 solved the problem.
sudo eopkg it https://mirrors.rit.edu/solus/packages/shannon/l/linux-current/linux-current-headers-5.2.20-130-1-x86_64.eopkg
Don't forget to switch to this kernel with clr-boot-manager or by hitting space during boot (for UEFI boot).
You'd be then faced with the "problem" that the system wants to upgrade the kernel, which you'd need to avoid. Manually unselect the kernel in the GUI when upgrading or upgrade using
sudo eopkg up -x linux-current
Thank you, bolofar and RaMa for your instructions! I must admit that I have never even messed with the kernel of my system in any way because I know basically nothing about the technical work behind all that. I rather always rely/relied on a system just working.
Time is quite of the essence for me at the moment so I think I'll try to sit through this and hope to see those issues fixed within the next few weeks. As stated abive I now switched to a Dell XPS machine which seems to do mostly fine.
One last question: how "deep" is the integration between the OS (Solus in this case) and the kernel? Is it normal to kind of rip out one kernel and just pop in another to see where this is going? It seems like it is from what I read but as I said I never really worked under the hood a lot.
Thanks so much again!
Hi
n2o how "deep" is the integration between the OS (Solus in this case) and the kernel?
Kernel is the core, where all is built around you could say, maybe you can see it as the foundation of a building, but then the changing appears not so easy as it is in a Linux based OS, so maybe easier to see it as the motor of a car... ;-)
Then the latest kernel (current) is a Tesla Elon Musk creation, and the LTS kernel is a Mercedes engine made in Germany proved by decades of experience...
And the changing of the kernel from the repository is not such a big issue, it is just a package like the other packages... already pre-made and tested to fit in, only if you remove all kernel packages you cannot drive around anymore :-)
Had to sign up to report the same issue with kernels after 5.3.8 I believe. My laptop is Acer Aspire R13, Intel i7-5500U. It's been going for about 3-4 weeks now, and so far I was waiting for a fix to come with one of the weekly updates, but to no avail. All seems to be just fine with my desktop machine on which I have only Solus installed - AMD Ryzen 5 2400G using the integrated Vega graphics.
Edit: both are Solus Budgie installs
Good to know! A week ago I was about to send the machine in because I was sure it had either a GPU or RAM problem. Good thing I didn't :o)
