Sabayon X runs, installs on desktop but not netbook [Solved]

[Crunnluath]

Hello,

I've just installed Sabayon X on my desktop (an old IBM Thinkcentre) and everything went smoothly. I wanted to install it on my netbook (an Acer Aspire One 722) but I can't get past the initial boot menu. Whether I select the live session or the installer, either way the screen goes black and everything just stops dead. I've tried both from a USB drive (the very same one that I successfully used to install Sabayon on the desktop) and from a DVD, the same thing happens. Does anyone have any ideas?

[Fitzcarraldo]

When you see the Live environment's boot menu, can you press F5? If so, try selecting one of the kernel boot parameters and see if one of those enables the netbook to boot. If the problem is the video driver, you can also try pressing Esc after F5 so as to clear the pop-up list of boot parameters, and then append other boot parameters to the kernel line. One to try would be xdriver=vesa.

Also, do you happen to know what hardware (CPU, GPU, Ethernet controller, wireless controller, etc.) is used in that netbook?

[Crunnluath]

I tried the various options in the F5 menu to no avail, but then I started looking at the boot parameters. It turned out to be the "vga=791" setting that was causing the problem -- after removing that, everything booted fine and I was able to install. I'm typing in Sabayon on my netbook right now, as a matter of fact. I remain baffled as to why that setting was causing the problem, as the resolution of the netbook screen is identical to that of the desktop monitor, and as I said in my first post, the live session loaded fine on that machine. Anyway, all is good now, and I just wanted to say thank you for the nudge in the right direction!

[Fitzcarraldo]

I remain baffled as to why that setting was causing the problem, as the resolution of the netbook screen is identical to that of the desktop monitor, and as I said in my first post, the live session loaded fine on that machine.

Probably due to the different GPUs in the two machines, therefore different video drivers, and the video driver actually installed on the Acer netbook doesn't support the vesafb (framebuffer) driver. See the note at the bottom of the SL 10 Press Release:

Q: I have a Radeon HD4000 and the UI does not boot, leaving me with a black screen.
A: You may have hit a drm/driver conflict with vesafb. Try to remove the following boot parameters (press F5 to edit the boot arguments): vga=791 or splash=... or video=vesafb:ywrap,mtrr:3. Or try passing splash=off replacing the previous value.