Sabayon Installation help, please

[iHateWindows]

OK. I am trying to install Sabayon 3.26 from the Live DVD. The computer is a Compaq <something> with a 1.0Ghz CPU with 640Mb of RAM. I have a 250Gb drive and a 30Gb drive in it. My goal is to set this up with PCLinuxOS, Sabayon, Fedora, Xandros, openSuSE and Ubuntu. I have a primary partition on the 30Gb drive and that is where I want to put Xandros. I put an extended partition on the 250Gb drive (spanning the whole thing) and that is sub-divided into 15 partitions so that each of the distros has exactly the same amount of HD space (except for Xandros since I know that I can get everything I want installed for less than 3Gb). So, I have successfully installed Fedora, PCLinuxOS, and openSuSE. I have the following partitions set up for Sabayon: 2Gb, 20Gb, and 25Gb. The 2Gb will be for swap, 20Gb for /, and 25Gb for /home.

I intend to install Xandros last in the hopes that it will detect the other 5 installs and add them to its LILO. If not, I am prepared to use GAG to get it done. In case you're wondering, the point of my doing this is so that I can try these out *and* so that I can loan the PC to some of my friends and see if they'd rather have a Linux than Windows. Hopefully, I can keep them from doing something tragic - like getting Windows Vista.

Last I tried to install Sabayon was yesterday evening. So, I can't recall all the text information it presented me with.

Here is the problem I have: When I choose "GUI Install", it loads Sabayon just fine (have to force openGL, but no sweat otherwise). However, it switches to a text install no matter what I do and stops when I get to a root prompt (looks like a login prompt, but I can't remember off-hand). I tried "startx", but that doesn't work and, if I recall correctly, gives me an error with a code of 104. I can't recall exactly what it says. If you really need it, I'll get it. I just figure that my major problem is getting the GUI installation to work and getting me off the text installation screen. After that, I *should* be able to complete the install.

Thanks for taking the time read this & for any help you can offer.

[yonndur]

To get the graphical or GUI installer you need x running. You didn't say what graphics/video card you have but if this was a relatively inexpensive compaq desktop then it may have onboard video.
It would really help to know exactly what the video/gpu is. Once you know you can select the driver by editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf see example below.
After where you see "Driver" is where you would edit the file to get the correct driver loaded for your gpu.
# **********************************************************************
# Graphics device section
# **********************************************************************

# Any number of graphics device sections may be present

Section "Device"
Identifier "VESA"
Driver "nvidia" # do not remove vesa
#Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps"
#Option "BusType" "PCI"
#Option "ColorTiling" "on"
#Option "EnablePageFlip" "on"
EndSection

[Jesterhead]

There are also cheat-codes to specify the driver the cd should load.

There are some topics about this in the forum, and also in the wiki.

[iHateWindows]

I cannibalized a KYRO Prophet 4500 graphics card with 64Mb of on-board RAM from an old desktop with a burnt-up CPU I still have laying around. It recognizes it as STMicroelectronics graphics card. I have to force the openGL or else it shows 2 tiles of the on-screen display that are side/side and only half as tall as the screen. I'll have a look at the wiki and find the other help that was mentioned above and see what I can find out. I appreciate the help and I'll let you know how this goes. So far, I've got Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, and Fedora on it now and openSuSE is installing at this time.

Thank you again!

[iHateWindows]

Well, at this point, I am not going to be able to get Sabayon installed. I have no way to even edit the xorg.conf file because I can't even get the desktop to come up. I get a text interface and this is the error I get:

Code: Select all

Fatal server error:
xf86MapVidMem: Could not mmap framebuffer (0x40000000,0xffff0000) (Cannot allocate memory)
XIO: fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server ":0.0"
after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.

No idea what command I could input into the text interface to edit the xorg.conf file from there. I tried "edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf", but it tells me that it is an unrecognized command. From everything I can find, it seems like I am the only idiot using a Kyro card since there is no documentation that I could find anywhere and it does not appear that my graphics card is supported anywhere. The odd thing is that when I installed Ubuntu, it worked just fine. Same with PCLinuxOS and Fedora. Previously, I have had Xandros installed and working fine, too. However, I didn't write down the pertinent info in THAT xorg.conf file for future use. Furthermore, at this time, I cannot boot into any of the OS's currently installed because the bootloader is not right and I have not used GAG on it, yet, figuring I would wait until I got all 6 installed and then GAG it.

Plus, I think I'm going to have to re-install anyway because I tried to boot into Ubuntu after installing PCLinuxOS and got a kernel panic. Since then, my display is pink for some unknown reason, even when booting from the CD. So, not sure what's up with that (never had kernel panic before). This whole undertaking is turning into a bigger headache than I had expected.

[yonndur]

You should be able to use your ubuntu install disk or live cd to set up grub and fix the ubuntu install provided you didn't overwrite it. You can also mount any of your other distros if you know what partitions they're on. Check man mount.
Also although you said you want to use gag if you are not running windows just having any one of your distros install grub to the mbr is easier-then just edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to get the others listed + each additional distro's grub should be installed to the respective root partition.
For editing files use nano.

[iHateWindows]

OK. So, Ubuntu's grub should be on Ubuntu's root partition, Fedora's should be on Fedora's, etc? I thought that they had to be written to the MBR on hda1, where the swap file is. Do I really even need to install each distro's bootloader, at all?

I still don't know why I can't edit the xorg.conf file while running Sabayon's liveDVD from within the text interface. I also don't understand why it switches to a text interface because the display is just fine up to a point.

Another problem I am now having is that I got a kernel panic when trying to boot into Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS last night and now my display is pink. No changes were made to the monitor's settings before that point. I have also gone back & deleted all my partitions, re-created them and then formatted them to ext2 and the screen is still pink. Monkeying with the primitive color controls on the monitor has not helped, either. The best I can do is to make it pinkish-blue or magenta. So, that particular problem actually has me more ticked off than the other problems I am having getting everything up and running (mainly because I actually don't mind re-installing the various distros as many times as required to get it where I want it).

Any thoughts on my pink screen? And what is nano?

[onlyoneskwalla]

What boot codes are you using, try some of the generic ones like xdriver=vesa. You can edit from the text screen, just remember the user= root :pass = root at the login. Then nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Once saved just restart x with /etc/init.d/xdm restart

Nano is a text editor.

[yonndur]

OK. So, Ubuntu's grub should be on Ubuntu's root partition, Fedora's should be on Fedora's, etc? I thought that they had to be written to the MBR on hda1, where the swap file is. Do I really even need to install each distro's bootloader, at all?

I still don't know why I can't edit the xorg.conf file while running Sabayon's liveDVD from within the text interface. I also don't understand why it switches to a text interface because the display is just fine up to a point.

Another problem I am now having is that I got a kernel panic when trying to boot into Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS last night and now my display is pink. No changes were made to the monitor's settings before that point. I have also gone back & deleted all my partitions, re-created them and then formatted them to ext2 and the screen is still pink. Monkeying with the primitive color controls on the monitor has not helped, either. The best I can do is to make it pinkish-blue or magenta. So, that particular problem actually has me more ticked off than the other problems I am having getting everything up and running (mainly because I actually don't mind re-installing the various distros as many times as required to get it where I want it).

Any thoughts on my pink screen? And what is nano?

As to the bootloader question-no you don't need to but I've multibooted up to a dozen different unix distros and it's easier for me to just add the lines title; rootnoverify; chainloader +1 and yes you can do that with linux as long as the bootloader your handing off to is on the root partition. It seems that you want to have the last distro you install be the one that installs grub to the MBR. But with that plan when you want to rearrange things you be doing a lot of editing of menu.lst. I know you mentioned gag-I don't use it so don't know much about it.

The pink display problem: Maybe it has nothing to do with any of the installs you did? Have you checked your video cable connection and/or the card itself. Sometimes things get unseated. It's also helpful to have a livecd around. What happens to the video display when you boot from a livecd like ubuntu or knoppix? If it's always showing the pink screen now even with a livecd then maybe it's a hardware problem.

[iHateWindows]

OK. Pink screen issue was a monitor problem. Swapped in spare monitor == all normal. However, there is no driver for the video card I am attempting to use. I did find that if I tell it to load vga driver, then it will attempt to start x. However, it tells me that the driver does not support depths of 8, 16, or 24. Does anyone have a source (URL) where I can find other generic drivers other than vga or vesa? Or perhaps there is a different depth I should specify? I haven't had time to look tonight, but will spend some time on Google tomorrow. I got Xandros, PCLinuxOS, Fedora, and openSUSE to play nice together and can boot into whichever of those I choose. Ubuntu keeps throwing an error about installing GRUB, but I haven't had time to check their forums for pertinent possible solutions (another task for tomorrow). Overall, I am really happy with the way this is now going and I very much appreciate the suggestions and information that you gave me. I was able to use that information to get things going in the right direction.

Probably the next thing I will attempt tomorrow is actually to remove the graphics card and just try to get Sabayon to use the onboard graphics and see what happens. I am also going to try using the liveDVD on the laptop that I am using to post this information. I would be equally satisfied to get it working on this machine because I am more interested in using it for myself rather than really setting up as a demo for friends & co-workers interested in test driving Linux. Since I have to re-deploy this machine in the next couple of weeks anyway, I will probably just partition the hard drive to accomodate Sabayon if running the liveDVD works out (this has an Intel i810 graphics chip).

Anyway, again, thank you very much for all your help and the time you spent on this.