How to boot sabayon to a console?

[Ecky]

Hi, sabayon noob here

Somehow or other, shortly after installing and getting my monitors up and running on the ati drivers, I managed to kill X completely dead without any idea how I managed it

Now when I try booting into sabayon I get no display whatsoever, not even a console, it's like it tries starting X, fails, but intstead of dropping back into a console it just freezes right there and the only thing I can do is hit the reset button

I'm fairly sure that if I can get into a console a simple aticonfig --initial should get me back into a desktop, but how to stop X starting thus booting into a console in sabayon appears to differ from what I'm used to. It has to be done using inittab or whatever is the relevant file in sabayon as I can't get into sabayon at all so I have to do the edit from within another OS

I'm accustomed to changing this line in /etc/inittab

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id:5:initdefault:

to

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id:3:initdefault:

But it's already set at 3

So what is the way to do it in sabayon?

[Ecky]

In terms of getting sabayon usable I decided it was gonna be quicker to just reinstall, but I would still like to know how to make sabayon boot into a console as it is something I do find useful

It looks like removing /etc/runlevels/boot/xdm might do it actually but I would've thought there'd be a simpler way than resorting to moving init scripts around just to get a console

[Ecky]

Well I got it booted into kdm by moving xdm and x-setup out of /etc/runlevels/boot, must investigate creating a new runlevel setup

When I logged in though I got no desktop, just a black screen with a white cursor which allowed me to do ... nothing

Dropped back to a console, removed the user and added a new one with: useradd -d /home/user -g users -p password -m and tried logging into kde as the new user

Same black desktop and white cursor, so thinking that whatever caused the initial problem might've had more far-reaching effects than I first realised I've decided not to invest any more time into fixing it in it's current state and just reinstall after all

A kde reinstall with a textmode package manager I'm not familiar with and that may not work anyway is likely to take up more time than I have to spare on this

Don't know whether I should've asked about the runlevel thing on a different section of the forum or not, but erm, thanks for listening anyway

[Ecky]

Have to concede defeat on this one, what I'm about to describe happened with kde dvd and bootable usb with the first iso I downloaded, downloaded it again from another mirror and the same thing happened again with a dvd and bootable usb

The live system failed to boot, stuck at some kdm background that didn't even look like a sabayon splash to me, very curious

Graphical Installer failed to boot, leaves me at a grey background with a little button at the bottom with 'Workspace 1' on it, no mouse pointer and no keyboard combinations that I know of did anything

Text installer I could actually run, but it's pretty much unusable if you have other systems installed you wanna keep as there was no way I could find that allows ya to tell it to install to a particular partition and leave everything else alone, must say I was surprised to find so limited a tool as part of the installer packaged with a distro as respected as sabayon

Bit of a disappointment as I really liked the look of sabayon when I installed it as a vm, maybe it just don't wanna play with my hardware, graphics card maybe, in case anyone's interested this is the hardware:

Mainboard: Gigabyte 880GMA-UD2H
Processor: Amd Phenom X6 1090T
Memory: 8GB (2x4Gb) Corsair Vengeance 1600Mhz DDR3
Graphics: XFX Ati Radeon HD 6850
PSU: Ocz 850watt (can't remember the model)

[res0r9lm2]

I had a problem with X where mouse drive wouldn't load because api mismatch but would go into X fine not that I could do anything once there and I couldn't drop out to a console. Lucky for me I had an old kernel without nvidia driver so booting that kept xorg from loading and added Option "IgnoreABI" "True" then it work again. One thing you should do is look through your recent Xorg logs and see what problem you are having they located in /var/log.

If you want to boot into a console you have to remove xdm from boot with rc-update.

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rc-update del xdm boot

[Ecky]

Unfortunately mate when booting into the graphical installer off a live media there isn't much of an xorg log file to look at

Thanks for the heads up on booting to a console but I passed that one and reinstalling the ati driver didn't fix my problem, there were deeper issues at work, such as my root password no longer being recognised for one so I suspect there was more going on than just a broken X

So I decided to reinstall but for some reason the only environment I could get booted using two different isos from two different mirrors is the text mode install, but that's no use to me because of the limited partitioning options which left me with 3 options

1. Wipe out my existing systems, there's a win 7, arch and debian already on this machine and there's no way I'm wiping those out just to try another OS that I think I might like

2. Put another drive in the machine just to install sabayon onto - you seen the price of hard drives lately! Though I probably have an old small drive or two in my many boxes of spares so I might revisit that option at some point

3. Don't install sabayon

I wouldn't say I'm some kind of linux guru by any stretch of the imagination but I'm definitly not clueless either and am certainly well used to installing and configuring a variety of distros, it's just for some reason this distro on this machine has proved to be uncommonly problematic and I've already spent most of the little free time I get over the past four days wrestling with it

Not giving up on sabayon altogether but I just can't throw any more time into getting it running on this machine right now, work to catch up on, bills to pay etc, but I will give it another shot, most likely on another machine possibly over the weekend

In fairness the graphics card and the two monitors connected to it haven't been the easiest to get running right in debian, opensuse and arch either, but I do have a machine that's used mainly for media activities running an am2 dual core with an older but decent nvidia graphics card (geforce gts 250) which in hindsight may be a better candidate for a sabayon testdrive

So, giving up on sabayon? Not a chance, just giving up on it with this machine for now

[BHReach]

Let me give you a few tips.

1. Sabayon appears to have 6 text consoles. You access them using

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Ctrl-Alt-F1 through F6

To return to X

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Ctrl-ALt-F7

2. Sabayon run levels 3, 4 and 5 are the same default run level. Run level 1 is single user. That is usually text mode used for maintenance.

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telinit 1

will switch to run level 1.

3. If X does not work from the Sabayon installation disk, Sabayon cannot auto configure your video so don't install it. 1st get to a text terminal e.g.

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Ctrl-Alt-F1

switch to root

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su -

run

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Xorg -configure

It will attempt to configure X for you. If errors occur, you will see them on the screen and in the .xsession-errors file. The errors should give a clue as to what your problems are.

A quick and dirty attempt to get X working would be to borrow Xorg.config from your Debian setup and try to use it.