Nothing appears on screen
If you booted from a USB drive or microSD and get a blank screen or a hang, go in this order:
- Did it boot at all? Check whether the machine reached the firmware menu. If not, the media wasn’t detected; a too-short USB write or an unbootable layout are the usual causes. Rewrite the image with the flash instructions and pick the right firmware entry (UEFI on modern machines).
- Does the console say something? Vitruvian prints boot output to the console. Note where the output stops. That usually points to the problem.
- Does it work in a VM? Boot the same image in QEMU. If the VM boots fine and your computer doesn’t, the problem is hardware-specific.
Desktop doesn’t come up
The graphical session is brought up by the desktop session manager. If you reach the desktop area and nothing renders, look at the console for an app_server or registrar error. Report what you see with the logs collected as described on the Status and Logs page.
Flashing seems to fail
The oflag=sync in the dd command is there for a reason: it forces the write to finish before you yank the drive. If you skipped it, dd may return while data still sits in cache. Re-flash with oflag=sync and wait out the drives you touched.
Weird display or resolution
Pick Safe Mode in the boot menu. It runs the display through the plain framebuffer (fbdev) instead of the GPU driver, and turns off user add-ons. If the desktop works there, the problem is likely the graphics driver for your card, so please report it with the logs.
An application stops responding
Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to open the Team Monitor. From there you can kill the application or restart the desktop. To shut down, use Shutdown in the Deskbar menu.