Upgrading to the version of gdm3 currently in apt (as of Friday, October 17th, 2025; listed as 48.0-3 by apt show) causes gdm to fail to present a greeter with login screen. I recommend that you do not update gdm until this problem is cleared!
The symptom of this version of gdm is that, after boot, instead of presenting a login screen, gdm leaves the console with the text-mode cursor in the top-left corner. Changing VTYs with alt+Fn does not yield a text-mode login.
A workaround is to install and activate a different greeter, either before update or after (if you can, for example, log into your machine over the network via ssh). You can enable greetd with:
This will leave you with a single text-mode login prompt on tty7; if you want to start a windowing environment, you will need to start it from that console (with, e.g., sway).
A version of firmware-misc-nonfree with this problem fixed is now in the MNT Debian repository and you should be able to grab it via apt update && apt upgrade.
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serious bugs of firmware-misc-nonfree (20250808-1 → 20250917-1+reform20251018T113910Z+1) <Outstanding>
b1 - #1118195 - firmware-misc-nonfree: no longer actually ships Arm Mali firmware, only link to non-existing file
Merged with: 1118261
Summary:
firmware-misc-nonfree(1 bug)
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Should I proceed with this? Thanks.
shigeru@mntpr-0:~$ sudo reform-check
I: Contents of /proc/device-tree/model: MNT Pocket Reform with i.MX8MP Module
I: `uname -a` output: Linux mntpr-0 6.16.9-mnt-reform-arm64 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 6.16.9-1+reform20250910T145641Z (2025-09-1 aarch64 GNU/Linux
I: Version of linux-image-mnt-reform-arm64: 6.16.9-1+reform20250910T145641Z
I: Version of reform-tools: 1.79-1+reform20250926T072932Z+1
I: Version of system image: System Image v4: 2024-08-20
I: To retrieve the latest sysctl and keyboard firmware versions either install libxmlb-utils or install curl, xz-utils and libxml2-utils
I: Version of system controller firmware: "20251001"
I: Version of keyboard firmware: "20251001"
I: probably booting via /boot/boot.scr (/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf does not exist)
I: Mount source of /: /dev/reformvg/root (LVM vg 'reformvg' on LUKS device 'reform_crypt' on SSD)
I: Mount source of /boot: /dev/mmcblk2p1 (eMMC)
I: the following files differ from how they are shipped by reform-tools (ignore /var/lib/alsa/asound.state):
??5?????? /var/lib/alsa/asound.state
I: eMMC contains the latest u-boot version 2025-01-12
apt-listchanges retrieves information from the Debian BTS. The Debian BTS does not know anything about packages in the repository by MNT. As far as the Debian BTS is concerned all versions of firmware-misc-nonfree of 20250808-1 or later are affected by RC bug #1118195. So apt-listchanges has no other choice than to tell you that version
20250917-1+reform20251018T113910Z+1 of the package is also affected. But you as the user can override this because you know that the version string indicates that the package comes from the MNT Debian repositories and not from the Debian repositories.