[solved] Graphic issue with Sparky Mate ISO on Jasper Lake

[TRon]

I've been running Sparky XFCE on an older machine for quite some time now and am very pleased with it. Thank you for that.

Whilst waiting for HD storage for a newly bought jasper lake machine (celeron N5105 with onboard Intel HD graphics), I downloaded the semi rolling mate edition of Sparky, and put the ISO on a USB flashdrive and boot that using Ventoy.

So far so good except for the fact that it seems that whenever I boot Sparky Mate (using the default grub option) that the graphics gets garbled (white snow) at randoms point in time, sometimes even before X is able to run and, eventually it will crash/reboot the machine.

The same (buggy) behaviour can be repeated in exactly the same way with Ubuntu-Mate.


The safe boot option works ok though (for both Sparky Mate and Ubuntu Mate) but that doesn't really allow me to get a good impression of Mate as the resolution seem limited to 800x600.


I'm inexperienced when it comes to running Linux on new(er) hardware and was unable to find any related issues in the Debian issue tracker (but that might be me noobness)

My question: Is the garbled graphics behaviour that results in a crash/reboot of the machine a known issue and/or is it something to worry about when doing a install (e.g. will a real install use other better/updated drivers ?) and/or can it perhaps be related to faulty/wrong hardware/BIOS settings ?

A distribution like f.e. FossaPup seem to run as intended on the same machine.

If there is anything else I should/could do and/or test then please just let me know as I have no clue as of what to do or expect atm.

tia

[TRon]

The faulty (jasper lake) graphics seems to be a generic theme for current (rolling) distro's.

The (semi-)rolling Sparky XFCE, Ubuntu as well as Linux Mint 21 show the same behaviour.

The thing that they all to seem to have in common is the intel i9156 driver but i assume because of the new used kernel that they have more in common then only that specific driver.

Also I was unable to find any related issues in the i915 drivers bugtracker (not to mention that Jasper Lake does not seem to be a something that is mentioned often).

I did try an older (stable) Sparky release but that either has issues with the BIOS (loads of errors and sometimes even gets stuck during early boot) and for sure is only able to show it's desktop in low graphics mode when run in live mode.

Isn't there any one out there with a Jasper Lake machine that has tried latest distro's and experience the same or similar issues (at least in live mode) ?

I still have the question that when I would to make an actual installation that the issues can be solved for example by updating the relevant drivers (I have no experience nor clue atm).

Is there anything else I (c/sh)ould try ? for example another distro that has more up to date intel drivers (as I am clueless with regards to such distro's as well) or would it be better to wait for an updated rolling (Sparky) release ?

Still waiting for my storage device to arrive so can't really install to try out atm.

tia

[TRon]

My HD finally arrived today and I went with installing Linux Mint Mate. No offense to sparky but their community seem a bit larger and I was able to find some related issues in their forums.

The graphical issues are solved after having done some updates but mint mate 21 still has some bugs related to the BIOS of this jasper lake machine (seem to be a common issue for newer machines, some issues were fixed around kernel 5.15 but re-introduced in newer kernels). Unfortunately Sparky (but also other current distro's that I have tried/mentioned) show similar issues.

As soon as Sparky Mate becomes more mature I'll give that a go as I'm very pleased with Sparky on my old machine and would like to repeat that for this newer machine.

Is there a dedicated/known time-line/release schedule for Sparky Mate ?

Sorry for the noise.

[TRon]

The 2022.12 Sparky Mate release fixed the graphical driver crashes in Live mode for me :thumbsup: