Trouble with Live DVD

[rebbi]

Hi,

I'm new to Linux. I've been burning up Bit Torrent like crazy downloading and testing distros on a Compaq Armada M700 laptop with a DVD reader and 256 MB RAM (soon to be 512 MB). What follows refers to the latest Live DVD.

The whole, impressive live boot sequence seems to run fine, music and all. But then instead of booting into the desktop, it boots into a command prompt, and I'm lost. Any ideas what's going on??

Many thanks,

Steve

[chickpea]

hmmm. When you boot up the livedvd go into verbose mode. That is, as soon as it starts to boot and you see the splash screen hit ALT F1 and copy down all the error message that you get. If the splash screen appears again, hit ALT F1 again.

Also have you checked your md5sum?

http://www.sabayonlinux.org/wiki/index. ... our_MD5SUM

It may be that your video card is having trouble loading. Since you are sent to a root prompt, you are in luck. Believe it or not, the livedvd is actually booted, but the xserver (the gui) is not loaded correctly.

Please post the output of these commands:

Code: Select all

lspci


Code: Select all

dmesg | grep "EE"


That way we can diagnose your problem and know a little bit more about your system.

[rebbi]

hmmm. When you boot up the livedvd go into verbose mode. That is, as soon as it starts to boot and you see the splash screen hit ALT F1 and copy down all the error message that you get. If the splash screen appears again, hit ALT F1 again.

Also have you checked your md5sum?

http://www.sabayonlinux.org/wiki/index. ... our_MD5SUM

It may be that your video card is having trouble loading. Since you are sent to a root prompt, you are in luck. Believe it or not, the livedvd is actually booted, but the xserver (the gui) is not loaded correctly.

Please post the output of these commands:

Code: Select all

lspci


Code: Select all

dmesg | grep "EE"


That way we can diagnose your problem and know a little bit more about your system.

Sorry it took me so long to respond to this post. I was never notified by email of the reply, even though I requested it.

Anyway...

Here's the result of the lspci command:

steve@1[~]$ lspci
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX Host bridge (rev 03)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX AGP bridge (rev 03)
0000:00:04.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1450 (rev 03)
0000:00:04.1 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1450 (rev 03)
0000:00:07.0 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02)
0000:00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
0000:00:07.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 USB (rev 01)
0000:00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 03)
0000:00:08.0 Multimedia audio controller: ESS Technology ES1978 Maestro 2E (rev 10)
0000:00:09.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev 09)
0000:00:09.1 Serial controller: Agere Systems LT WinModem
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage Mobility P/M AGP 2x (rev 64)
0000:02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)

This is running under SimplyMepis 6.5, which is my current distro. Hopefully the output is relevant. I'll have to boot into Sabayon (as far as I can) and post the dmesg output separately.

Thanks for the help,

Steve

[darkscot]

The whole, impressive live boot sequence seems to run fine, music and all. But then instead of booting into the desktop, it boots into a command prompt, and I'm lost. Any ideas what's going on??

It seems you have an ATI graphics card which Sabayon sometimes has problems with.
Before you boot up press F5 and enter the following:
xdriver=ati
then press enter.

[rebbi]

The whole, impressive live boot sequence seems to run fine, music and all. But then instead of booting into the desktop, it boots into a command prompt, and I'm lost. Any ideas what's going on??

It seems you have an ATI graphics card which Sabayon sometimes has problems with.
Before you boot up press F5 and enter the following:
xdriver=ati
then press enter.

Yes, that did it, thank you! Now if I could only enable any graphics acceleration on this crappy, old graphics card!

Steve

[chickpea]

I have a similar (Rage m r128 based) graphics card. I was never able to get acceleration working (usably). The free drivers will get beryl to work, but just barely and the whole system will run so slow as to be unusable. The closed drivers, just won't allow us to run accelerated graphics.

[rebbi]

I have a similar (Rage m r128 based) graphics card. I was never able to get acceleration working (usably). The free drivers will get beryl to work, but just barely and the whole system will run so slow as to be unusable. The closed drivers, just won't allow us to run accelerated graphics.

Yeah, I would figure as much.I was in the Sabayon IRC channel yesterday and told somebody that I tried running Sauerbraten (not knowing that it was a first person shooter) and got a frame rate of 2 FPS. LOL!