Gemini Debian: Booting Debian on safe mode / GRUB -- How To?

[nthunter]

Hi there!

I've made a terrible mistake of enabling the hardware compositor and now my Debian system logs in into a black screen where only the mouse pointer is to be seen soon after the login screen.

Try as I might, I cannot access GRUB at boot, nor launch a terminal on login (tried all combinations of CTRL+ALT+Function keys).

Is there a way to boot Debian into GRUB/Safe Mode/launch a terminal so I can undo this change somehow?

Super thanks!

[ZimbiX]

Is it even using grub? Maybe you can mount the Linux partition in Android to fiddle with the grub arguments from there

[nthunter]

It's definitely not using GRUB, I've just found. The bootloader is a box of mystery to me, I'll have to check the Gemian source and see if there's any hint there of what it is and how it works. It gets flashed into the machine via the MediaTek firmware tool we use when installing the OSs in it, it's an image file. Perhaps mounting that on another system might yield some information. Still, would be nice if the Gemian folks documented this somewhere.

I'm running a Linux-only Gemini, so the solution is to re-flash it and start again. Oh well.

I'm assuming Gemian is still the best Linux to run on the Gemini (based on Debian 9.4 Stretch). Is there a viable option out there?