Booting off of F12 Alpha disk display goes blank. [Archive]

jvillain

27th August 2009, 12:05 AM

On booting off of the F12 Alpha DVD I get to the initializing hardware part and then the screen goes blank and never returns. This happens before the test your disk pop up. I still have keyboard as I am able to do an alt+ctrl+del to reboot. I know the disk is OK because I threw it in another machine and did a check sum on it. I have tried alt+ctr+<F1-12> and none of them will let me see any thing. I also tried alt+ctr+<+/->. I tried the safe mode and I have tried the rescue option. I have tried appending 'linux singe' to the boot prompt . I have tried 'modprobe vesa' as well as nv and nouveau and none of those help. The display still goes blank at initialization time. Because it hasn't mounted the disks yet I have no logs to look at.

It is a P3 system with an old gforce3 card and an LG W2353V monitor. Can any one think of a way to force it to stay in VGA/text mode long enough for me to see what is going on? I don't have another computer around with a serial port so I can't try to dump the console to serial.

Debroyston

27th August 2009, 04:50 PM

I have tried F12-Alpha-x86_64-Live.iso and F12-Alpha-x86_64-Live-KDE.iso but neither will boot. There is a message on screen to say that "No Signal Received".
The motherboard is Asus P5E3 with an Intel E8200 Core2 duo. I have a graphics card using the Nvidia GF8500GT chip set and 2Gb of memory.
Does any one else have this problem?

Correction.
Message on screen reads "No Signal Detected"
I also notice that there is no Internet connection.

phoenixpb

27th August 2009, 05:33 PM

i have the same problem
during the boot monitor goes off (no signal)

(nvidia 4 MX card)

AdamW

27th August 2009, 07:22 PM

there should be options at the very first boot menu to install in 'basic graphics mode' (which is vesa), or text mode.

jvillain

27th August 2009, 10:23 PM

There is no 'Text Mode' but I tried the 'Basic' mode with no luck. These are all NVidia cards though so that should tell us some thing. The fact that Debroyston get a a no signal rather than out of range or some thing else may be telling us that the video card is not initializing at all rather than being misconfigured. Does any one know if there is a way to force the installation environment to use a specific driver and resolution? Modprobe as a kernel variable doesn't seem to cut it.

If I can find the power cable for my old laptop I will try hooking them together with a null modem cable and try passing

console=ttyS1,9600 console=tty0

on the kernel prompt. If it works I may be able to see some error messages to help narrow this down.

I would open a bug report but I really don't have enough to report yet for it to be useful.

Hoyt

28th August 2009, 01:12 AM

there should be options at the very first boot menu to install in 'basic graphics mode' (which is vesa), or text mode.

My CD has neither a "basic" or "text" boot mode - I cannot find a way to load the vesa driver.
Some users have seen a kernel panic, I do not. I do see the "]" messages.

jvillain

28th August 2009, 04:59 AM

Do you have a live disk or and install disk Hoyt?

Zlobniy Shurik

28th August 2009, 06:46 AM

The same problem...
Video - HD 4850 (other hardware according to http://www.smolts.org/client/show/pub_f872b404-f06f-4950-8aa7-6e3d43f981f3)

I try to load system with any kernel newer than 2.6.31-0.125.4.2.rc5.git2.fc12.x86_64 - failure...

After loading smartd I see blank screen, Ctrl+Alt+F1-F7 - not working. :(

Xorg.log in attachment

I try without xorg.conf and with xorg.conf created by Xorg :0 - configure - no difference

But with kernel 2.6.31-0.125.4.2.rc5.git2.fc12.x86_64 - all working perfectly! :confused:

Debroyston

28th August 2009, 10:27 AM

AdamW

28th August 2009, 09:52 PM

One of the testers who happens to have the exact same hardware as you? Er, well, that's a fairly long shot.

Just because you all see the same _symptoms_ does not mean it's the same _problem_. So far all we know is 'it doesn't boot'. My inclination is to suspect something in the graphics stack (at the kernel or X.org level, hard to tell) in all cases but it's really not particularly clear.

One parameter NVIDIA users can try is 'nouveau.modeset=0', give that a shot and see if it changes anything.

jvillain

28th August 2009, 10:42 PM

nouveau.modeset=0 did get me farther down the road. I at least get to the "Running Anaconda Installer" message before the screen goes blank again. I believe it is trying to switch video modes at that point.

That does tell me though that it is trying to use the nouveau driver. I'll do some digging and see if I can find some other settings that I can use.

AdamW

28th August 2009, 11:13 PM

if you have an NVIDIA chipset, yes, it will use nouveau by default. The 'basic' option should use vesa at the X.org level, though the nouveau kernel module may still load, so you should still use nouveau.modeset=0 if you try that avenue. Basically, try the 'basic' option with the nouveau.modeset=0 kernel parameter, and see if that does the trick.

jvillain

29th August 2009, 12:27 AM

That did indeed do the trick. I have to admit I am a little lost on how it is able to load both the vesa driver and nouveau driver at the same time, but I willing to declare victory.

For any one that is still having grief after that you can try adding nouveau.modeset=0 to the end of the kernel prompt for rescue mode and once you are down there try running anaconda -T. That got anaconda going in text mode for me. I wouldn't try it if you are trying to upgrade as I don't know what the implications would be of running it that way. But if you are doing a fresh install in a VM or on new hardware you have nothing to loose in trying.

Debroyston

29th August 2009, 08:23 AM

jvillain

29th August 2009, 03:46 PM

Have you sucsessfully installed the F12 Alpha disk and are getting a blank screen Debroyston? Or are you getting a blank screen while trying to install? Do you have an an NVidia card or a some thing else?

Debroyston

29th August 2009, 04:46 PM

First attempt was a blank screen following the splash screen showing "Fedora will start in 10secs".
I tried adding "nouveau.modeset=0" which then got as far as the dark blue/blue/white progress bar with Fedora 11.92 at the end. The screen then goes blank although there is still activity showing on both CD drive and hdd.
The graphics card uses Nvidia GF8500GT chip set, jvillain.
With so many experiencing problems I thought Fedora might have responded b now.

jvillain

29th August 2009, 05:24 PM

When you get to the Grub screen press the 'A' key to append. That will bring up the boot prompt. Add a space to the end of that followed by

nouveau.modeset=0 linux single

then hit <enter>. That should take you into single user mode which is all text based. After that type in init 3 which will take you to multi user text mode mode. It also enables your network connections. At that point you can either run 'yum upgrade kernel' or just 'yum upgrade' to upgrade every thing.

If you get any error messages about the network run 'ifconfig' to make sure your interface is started. If it isn't try 'ifup eth0' if your running on a wired system.

marko

30th August 2009, 03:15 AM

Excuse my ignorance but how do I jnstal kernel 2.6.31-0.125.4.2.rc5.git2.fc12.x86_64 ?
I am a fairly newcomer to Linux and can manage some things but this is the first time I have come across this.

You don't need to do anything special because that's the kernel that the Alpha comes with on the DVD

Debroyston

30th August 2009, 06:01 AM

Thanks jvillain.
I followed your instructions and all went well and the kernel upgrade went OK. I could not then get the graphics mode working and I do not know how to install from the text mode. Is this possible?

jvillain

30th August 2009, 07:55 AM

Try this reboot the OS and when you get the greb menu hit the 'A' key to append and then just add

xdriver=nouveau nomodeset

onto the end of the boot prompt. Then hit enter and let us know what happens.

Debroyston

30th August 2009, 05:24 PM

I followed your suggestion, jvillain, but to no avail.
The usual "No Signal Detected" followed by a blank screen. The Hdd and cdrom were active.
I also noticed that there was no internet connection and the keyboard was dead.

jvillain

30th August 2009, 07:58 PM

I was getting the same thing on my laptop ogver here but that had cured it for me. I am not surprised you had no keyboard or network as it appears to be a full on crash. If you get it running again try looking for a core with a matching time stamp. It might come in useful to the developers for debugging.

The last thing I can think of to try is

xdriver=vesa nomodeset

Do you have an existing xorg.conf file in place? If so try renaming it and then try these steps again.

Debroyston

31st August 2009, 04:15 PM

Thanks jvillain. No success at all. I will just have to be patient and wait to see if there is a corrected release or perhaps the beta version might be satisfactory.

AdamW

1st September 2009, 12:53 AM

jvillain: the secret is that there's two nouveau drivers. :) There's the kernel module called 'nouveau' which handles kernel-side stuff - like modesetting - and the X driver called 'nouveau'. Even if you set X to vesa instead, the kernel nouveau driver still gets loaded and does its stuff. So it seems like the nouveau modesetting stuff screws up the vesa driver.

Might be interesting to know if it works with just 'nouveau.modeset=0', but not using the vesa driver (so using nouveau with modesetting disabled)?

AdamW

1st September 2009, 12:54 AM

nomodeset doesn't work at present in F12. you have to use 'nouveau.modeset=0' (or 'intel.modeset=0' or 'radeon.modeset=0', depending on what driver your hardware uses). It's a bug, it's being worked on.

jvillain

1st September 2009, 03:43 AM

Might be interesting to know if it works with just 'nouveau.modeset=0', but not using the vesa driver (so using nouveau with modesetting disabled)?

Just took it for a try again to verify booting off the alpha disk. It works good up until the part where Anaconda launches. The screen goes blank then. That is on my P3 system with a GForce3 card.

nomodeset does actually work on my laptop which is a newer NVidia mobile chipset. But it only works when booting from hard drive not the alpha disk. It was the only way I could get KDE to start. It wouldn't recognize any thing beyond 800x600 though. Until this morning that is. Some thing they pushed over night finally got my laptop top to actually do KMS and it now runs in native mode. That is a big relief as I haven't had any thing better that 800x600 for months. I wish I could tell you exactly what it was but I updated over 600 packages this morning. Last time I checked the nouveau docs my chipset wasn't supposed to be supported at all so it was a big surprise.

Your explanation about how there are two parts to the driver also explains the question I have been chewing on about why if the driver was compiled into the kernel there is still a seperate driver package but that explains it.

Debroyston

1st September 2009, 05:42 AM

AdamW: After adding nouveau.modeset=0 the dark blue/blue/white progress bar runs but then the screen goes blank. Hdd and CD-ROM activity continues.
Adding (suggested by jvillain)

nouveau.modeset=0 linux single

Enters text mode and I can install applications.

I have found that previous releases did not set the display to my monitor and I had to install system-config-display. When I did this and try to run this the following happened:-
Blank screen and then returned to text mode with the mesaage

Couldn't start X server on Card0
Couldn't start X server with old config, trying with a fresh configuration.

Blank screen for a couple of seconds and then returned with
Couldn't start X server on Card0
Error, failed to start X server.

I then tried running anaconda. Blank screen followed by

Missing dependency: libaudit.so.0()(64bit) is needed by package anaconda-12.17-1.fc12.x86_64(rawhide).
Trying to install this is stated to be "unavailable".

jvillain

1st September 2009, 06:52 AM

Interesting I did a locate on /lib64/libaudit.so.0 and it had it listed on my machine. When I tried to find it, it wasn't where it was supposed to be. So I did an updatedb and plugged in /lib64/libaudit.so which than cam back with /lib64/libaudit.so.1 so .0 has recently been depreciated and .1 has taken it's place.

rpm -q --whatprovides /lib64/libaudit.so.1 gives audit-libs-2.0-3.fc12.x86_64

Have you done a full upgrade, as in 'yum upgrade' ?

Debroyston

1st September 2009, 01:41 PM

No, jvillain, I tried to run yum upgrade but there are numerous errors. I wll try to upgrade Audi-libs later and see where that gets me.
Many thanks again for your help and advice.

AdamW

1st September 2009, 07:05 PM

debroyston: unfortunately you're running into some Rawhide breakage - you won't be able to get anaconda installed. It needs a rebuilt for an updated audit-libs package.

If you're on the live CD, try booting with 'nouveau.modeset=0 3', which will get you a full text boot rather than single user mode. Then you can create an xorg.conf with the steps here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_xorg.conf

probably the Xorg -configure section is the best bet. Then change the driver to 'vesa' in the generated xorg.conf. Then you should be able to start X.

jvillain: good news that things work with KMS and nouveau driver in current Rawhide. That should mean they will work that way in Anaconda in future too, so we don't have to worry any more. thanks for the update!

Debroyston

6th September 2009, 05:36 PM

I have been trying various option with limited success, jvillain.
Down loaded nightly release of update Rawhide. The only advantage was a decrease in the number of upgraded applications. Still the same old problem though.
Booted with nouveau.modeset=0 3.
Next:-
yum upgrade kernel
yum upgrade
yum install sytsem-config-display
system-config-display --noui --set-driver=vesa
startx.
Long pause then a blue screen and F12 Live started. Installed and then set monitor to the one I am using and checked to ensure that vesa driver was still in use.
Rebooted. Graphics failure.
I am confused about nouveau. Are all Nvidia chip sets covered? Why does it appear to cause so many problems?
Thanks again for your interest and help.

Demz

7th September 2009, 12:35 AM

I am confused about nouveau. Are all Nvidia chip sets covered? Why does it appear to cause so many problems?
Thanks again for your interest and help. no i dont think so? not yet

that driver is a OpenSource driver made by some guy at redhat, the one Nvidia has hasnt had any real major features in it for a long time so there paying a guy at redhat to make an open source driver

AdamW

8th September 2009, 08:20 PM

not exactly. nouveau is a project with more than one developer, which has existed for a long time, to produce a better free driver for NVIDIA cards. We _hired_ the main nouveau developer, Ben Skeggs (rather than paying someone who already worked at RH to start a project, as you suggest).

nouveau works great on a lot of hardware, but it's pretty inevitable any different driver will have a problem on _some_ card that the old driver didn't.

You probably need to add nouveau.modeset=0 to your bootloader configuration permanently, not just use it during install; I suspect that's why you get a black screen on rebooting.

Debroyston

9th September 2009, 05:40 AM

I am using a graphics card with the 8500GT chip set. Is there a recommended series for Nouveau?
Where do I find the file to add noveau.modeset=o? I have searched but it has alluded me.

AdamW

9th September 2009, 09:54 PM

On the kernel boot command line. When you boot the live CD, it should show a graphical Fedora boot menu for a brief time (about 10 seconds), with a message saying it'll boot in 10 seconds (and counting down from 10). press tab on that screen. Then press tab again, and it should let you edit the kernel command line. Add 'nouveau.modeset=0' (note that you have to spell 'nouveau' correctly, and it's the number 0 not the letter o) to the end of the command line.

Debroyston

13th September 2009, 05:23 AM

I have made a little progress.
I have been downloading the nightly-composes from:-
http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/nightly-composes/
Entering nouveau.modeset=0 enables the 'live' mode and I can install and that is that. Upon rebooting the blank screen returns!
I tried leaving the disk in when rebooting and scrolling down to Boot From Local Drive. Pressing TAB and adding nouveau.modeset-0 had no effect.
Any further suggestions would be very welcomed.

jvillain

13th September 2009, 08:35 AM

Can you get to run level 3 so you can run a full update. The instructions for how to do that are posted a number of times in here .

Debroyston

14th September 2009, 05:24 PM

Using the download from the nightly-composes I can enter the text mode but upon upgrading I get the following:-
rawhide/filelists_db 16MB
Finished Dependency Resolution
python-cryptsetup-0.0.9-2.fc12.x86_64 from installed has depsolving problems.
Missing Dependency: libcryptsetup.so.0()(64bit) is needed by package python-cryptsetup-0.0.9-2.fc12.x86_64(installed)
You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
You could try running: package -cleanup --problems
package -cleanup --dupes
rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest
None of these work.

I have tried kde and lxde with similar results.
I liked lxde and if it was made satisfactory I think I would use it. At present there is no icon to install to hdd but running anaconda went OK up to partitioning when the following appeared:-
Error
Unable to read group information from repositories.
This is a problem with the generation of your install tree.
Clicking on the 'Retry@ button has no effect.
Being a glutton for punishment I will keep trying!

AdamW

14th September 2009, 10:27 PM

that's a known bug in Rawhide as of today, nothing you can do about it, someone just screwed up a package update. Wait for tomorrow's Rawhide and it ought to be better.

Debroyston

23rd September 2009, 05:28 PM

I note that the correspondence regarding this thread has ground to a halt. Does this mean that users have abandoned the release/

I have been trying the "Snap" releases and the night-composes without making any progress. Do we have to wait for the Beta release and hope it has been sorted out?

AdamW

23rd September 2009, 05:33 PM

what do you mean by 'no progress'? What's happening?

Debroyston

24th September 2009, 05:06 AM

Debroyston

2nd October 2009, 04:27 PM

Time to "Drop The Dead Donkey" I guess.
I have tried just about every available download with the same result.
Perhaps the next release of Sidux will be more user friendly.

jvillain

2nd October 2009, 08:31 PM

Your trying to install alpha software and your bitching about "user friendly"? If you want some thing user friendly install F11.

I note that the correspondence regarding this thread has ground to a halt.

That is because every one else has read the thread followed the instructions and have there stuff working.

"unable to read group information from repositories etc"

Is your network started? Can you reach any thing else on the net? Is it trying to read your install CD and you removed it?

Demz

3rd October 2009, 12:05 AM

Alpha/Beta software is NEVER user friendly

diamond_ramsey

3rd October 2009, 01:47 AM

I am unable to install to hard disc despite successive updates and the number of upgrades has not diminished. Entering nouveau.modeset=0 3 at boot enables me to operate in root mode but any attempt to install repeats the warning about being "unable to read group information from repositories etc"

Debroyston, was this during your yum updates?

Are you able to do the following:

ping -v 0.fedora.ntp.pool.org

as well as

nslookup 0.fedora.ntp.pool.org

See attached Screenshot-5

Debroyston, if you are using Fedora, then which version? If you are not using Fedora 11, then try -

http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora

Also, you could wait for the Fedora 12 Beta Release on 2009-10-13 or the Fedora 12 Final Release on 2009-11-10 -

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/12/Schedule

FYI, on six different machines, I was able to do the Fedora 12 Alpha. Definitely needed to contribute and read the forums for myself. I am looking forward to the F12 Beta as well as Final Release, too. :v)

Hope this helps. ;)

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* Fedora 9 (Sulphur) kernel - vmlinuz-2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686
* Fedora 10 (Cambridge) kernel - vmlinuz-2.6.27.30-170.2.82.fc10.i686
* Fedora 11 (Leonidas) kernels - vmlinuz-2.6.30.5-43.fc11.i586 and vmlinuz-2.6.30.5-43.fc11.i686.PAE
* Fedora 12 (Constantine) kernels - vmlinuz-2.6.31-33.fc12.i686 and vmlinuz-2.6.31.1-56.fc12.i686.PAE
With eight (8) x86_64 computing cores, 16 GB of RAM and SATA Seagate 7200.12 500 GB harddisk.
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