Problem with Sabayon 9 Live?

[BHReach]

I tried booting Sabayon 9 Daily (7/8/12). I put LXDE and E17 on USB sticks and E17 on a DVD. Same problem with all 3.

I select an option from the grub screen and the screen goes blank. Nothing happens.

I tried the NOAPIC kernel switch which helped other people with this problem but it had no effect.

I tried the Debug Mode and it started to boot, it gave me a Busy Box command line prompt. I had no idea what to do with that but it said the exit command would continue the boot process so I tried it and surprise surprise it booted up and worked (all 3 did the same thing).

Does anyone know how to fix this?

[BHReach]

More problems, I cannot not install any of the three. They all do the same thing. The installation says it completed but during the services configuration stage, the system crashes and reboots with a grub error message. Most likely grub was not installed before it crashed.

[wolfden]

Have you tried with the official release of sabayon 9 instead of a daily? It's possible that something is wrong with the daily you're trying to use. With no information, nobody can help.

[BHReach]

Have you tried with the official release of sabayon 9 instead of a daily? It's possible that something is wrong with the daily you're trying to use. With no information, nobody can help.

This problem started before the SL 9 release.

The live XFCE and Gnome DVDs boot and work OK, KDE, Awesome, E17, and LXDE do not.

I have a new AMD (formerly ATI) Radeon HD6570 Graphic Adapter. That may be part of the problem.

AFAIK, here no longer is an Awesome version of SL and there is no official SL 9 release for E17 or LXDE, just the weeklies. Probably because they are experimental.

I cannot make the live DVDs work correctly but if I install spinbase (it only takes 5 minutes) and add the programs I use, I have tested that with plain icewm and with LXDE and both seem to work fine. I don't think I would have a problem if I installed any of the desktops starting from spinbase. I am using the AMD proprietary Radeon driver if that matters.

The fact that I can 'trick' the live DVDs into booting up by going through debug mode would indicate the problem is a small one but trying to figure out what it is may be non trivial. The inability to install may be unrelated to the booting problem, I have had problems in the past trying to install on a HD previously partitioned and formated using lvm by the installer. The problem may or may not be related to that.

There was a learning curve installing from spinbase but now that I have done it, it is not a big deal. And I have the benefit of a small light system with just the programs I need installed.

[wolfden]

hmmmm, dunno, but I know ati has been a real mess lately with the latest xorg changes, doesn't explain that some do and some don't tho. Your card should be supported as far as I know. There has been a big discussion on your ML about it. One can see it here: http://lists.sabayon.org/pipermail/deve ... 08188.html

Yea awesome was dropped and e17 and lxde have been left as dailys. I generally don't have issues with the dailys.

[BHReach]

I read through that ML stuff. If that is the problem and a reload of the X server works, a trivial solution would be to put in a small time delay before loading the X server.

Let's review my observations:

With SL 9 or weekly ISO Live DVDs, Gnome and XFCE boot and work OK. KDE, LXDE and E17 don't.

Selecting debug from the Grub menu and exiting without doing anything gets LXDE and E17 Live DVDs to work (didn't try KDE). That is consistent with using a delay before loading the X server.

I tried Gentoo Live DVD AMD64 multilib 2012.1 and it works with my hardware (I think it uses the Xorg Radeon driver).

I tried PC LINUX OS live DVD, it is a KDE based distro with excellent hardware detection. It works with my hardware (I think it uses the flgrx driver).

Looking at how Gentoo and PCLOS do hardware detection and configuration might shed some light on how to resolve this problem.

I also noticed that booting from a modern high speed usb flash drive (like this one: http://www.amazon.com/Patriot-Xporter-Boost-Flash-PEF8GUSB/dp/B000VE2RP6) is much faster than using a DVD.

[Fitzcarraldo]

If it boots when you select the 'Debug mode' entry in the menu then have you compared the options in the two boot lines?

Start Sabayon 9 KDE:

Code: Select all

root=/dev/ram0 initrd=/boot/sabayon.igz aufs init=/linuxrc cdroot cdroot_type=udf looptype=squashfs loop=/livecd.squashfs splash=silent,theme:sabayon video=vesafb:ywrap,mtrr:3 vga=791 console=tty1 quiet

Debug mode:

Code: Select all

root=/dev/ram0 initrd=/boot/sabayon.igz aufs init=/linuxrc cdroot cdroot_type=udf looptype=squashfs loop=/livecd.squashfs console=tty1 debug

Actually, I don't know why "vga=791" is used in the boot options, as it is deprecated in GRUB 2. I'm not using it in my HDD installation.