Verbose messages during boot

[dougallen]

I'm a newbie to Sabayon, having just switched a couple of days ago from Fedora 17 after reading great reviews. My experience so far has been good apart from one or two niggles, none of which are show stoppers. I'll only tackle the first one here and would appreciate help and advice.

After installing Sabayon 10 AMD 64-bit edition from the Live DVD, it started the boot but then displayed a corrupt screen from where I could get no further. I have an ATI Mobility HD 3650 card and checked that it had recognised this correctly and used the opensource radeon driver (my card is not supported in the 12.8 proprietary driver. It had done the correct thing, so I then removed the console=tty1 from the boot parameters. All is now well except that all the messages overwrite the Sabayon splash until it gets to the login screen. I have quiet and splash-silent set.

I must be missing something simple, and I'd welcome a pointer to help me out.

Many thanks

Doug

[Fitzcarraldo]

See the thread Strange problem with radeon HD2600. Linux users with ATI GPUs up to and including 4xxx have to do things differently since AMD recently designated them as legacy GPUs.

[dougallen]

Many thanks for your quick reply. I've heard about ATI's relegation of "old" cards, which I gather also causes issues with power management (and therefore heat), particularly relevant to laptop users.

I tried removing console-tty1 and the splash, video and vga strings mentioned in the article to which you pointed me. If I leave console=tty1 in, I can't boot at all, so that has to come out. When I take out the other strings as well, the Sabayon splash disappears but I still get all the messages throughout the boot process up to the login screen. So the only apparent affect seems to be to change the background to nothing (whereas the sabayon splash gets overwritten if I leave it in), and I still get the verbose messages.

I'd welcome any more suggestions for this annoying "feature". It doesn't affect operation, but I'd quite like to sort it out before I change several of my friends to Sabayon. The plus features of Sabayon make it particularly attractive to me, but this visual thing will probably sap the confidence and trust of some of my more nervous friends....

Thanks again.

Doug

[dougallen]

Just a progress report.

I've now updated the kernel to 3.6-r1. I then restored the GRUB commands to include the console-tty1, the splash=silent,theme:sabayon, the video=vesafb:ywrap,mttr:3, and the vga=791. So it is now exactly as originally installed. I'm pleased to say that it works really well now. Most of the messages are hidden, the splash appears normally, and there are only the odd momentary screen flashes during the boot process.

Can anyone confirm that I have done the correct thing, or are there any changes I should make to reflect the combination of the kernel and open driver updates? I have an ATI Mobility Radeon HD3650 card in my laptop, so the ATI (AMD) proprietary drivers are now of no relevance to me. I'd just like to be sure that I'm getting the best from the open source drivers.

Many thanks.