Hi John, I fail to see how not having lightdm installed cane prevent you to start Mate. Here (Slint, not Debian), after having selected Mate as desktop with the session-chooser command, just typing startx starts Mate. Then from Mate just pressing Ctrl+Alt+F2 through Ctrl+Alt+F6 make you switch one of the consoles (tty2 through tty6), keeping Braille in all environments. You can also switch back to Mate pressing Alt+F7 and also switch to froma a console to another one (number n) pressing Alt+Fn. Anyway you could post in the debian-accessibilty mailing list to get help on Debian specific issues. Cheers, Didier -- Didier Spaier Slint maintainer Le 08/03/2022 à 12:31, Linux for blind general discussion a écrit : > Hello, > > I use Debian in command mode. Until about a year ago, when I booted up, lightdm would start in text mode and ask for user and password. It would then start Mate with Orca. I could use the GUI by pressing Alt+F7. Then it suddenly started setting the screen to not-text mode. > To be able to use the machine in my primary uses I had to disable lightdm. This meant that I couldn't use Mate. I just switched to Windows for a GUI. How can I configure lightdm to not put the screen in grap;hics mode and to again ask for username and password in text mode where brltty can handle them. Then start the GUI in tty7. > > Thanks, > John > _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list