What is bootable? - Page 2

smr54 · #16 27th February 2011, 03:21 AM

Unfortunately for those who own NVidia, this is where one gets bitten by Fedora's being, in many ways, a development platform. Adam W. has explained, quite eloquently, why this will sometimes happen, and I think most folks who use Fedora come to realize it--basically, right now, noveau is being forced upon us, making us into guinea pigs. The good part of this is that it will get it to be a really viable alternative more quickly than would happen if, for example, the xf86-video-nv was used, and people just either used that or got the proprietary.

The bad side, of course, is that it makes getting many machines with NVidia to work somewhat harder.

My own technique is to do a minimal install. Then I won't have to worry about X. Also, before rebooting (after installation), I use ctl+alt+f2 to get to a console, cd into /mnt/sysimage/etc/ and edit grub.conf to make sure it has nomodeset, and to also change the timeout from 0 to 3.

Now, I should be able to get a console. At that point, I can use Leigh's guide to get the regular NVidia driver working.

I'm sure there are other ways to do it, but at present, this is the one that I've found to be relatively easy for me. While I understand, and applaud Fedora's reasoning, it will, till noveau really gets working, make it somewhat more difficult on many machines with NVidia. I have the vague feeling that I've seen somewhere that the idea is to get it to go to VESA if noveau doesn't work, but I haven't seen that happen yet.

DCOH · #17 27th February 2011, 03:45 AM

I used the Fedora15-RC1 DVD iso and installed ok, but on firstboot there was nothing to add user. I than did a second fresh install and was able to login. The only other problem was with an update that didn't have the latest upower and the desktop would not finish loading. After fixing that problem it is working again, not crazy about Gnome 3 at this time as several things crash, and the new menus are going to take some getting use to.

smr54 · #18 27th February 2011, 05:47 AM

OK, this time I tried a default again. There is a message that seems to pop up only on occasion, telling me it couldn't load Gnome 3--to learn more about Gnome 3 see, and gave a link with no indication of graphic requirements. So, I upped the video memory on VBox, enabled 3D acceleration, and installed Guest Editions. It would then start to boot and go to a black screen--as it's VirtualBox, hitting escape and all that doesn't seem to work to get to the grub menu, and of course, this was the one time I didn't bother resetting the time out.

So, I said the heck with it. It isn't something I'd use anyway--judging from Gnome users like Dan on another thread, it's not all that great anyway.

To sum up...meh, this Gnome 3 is definitely not ready for prime time--if one uses Fedora as I do, it's fine, but for this typical desktop user, whoever they may be, it's got some fixing. Of course, it's an alpha edition right now, though it is being marked as RC2.

I guess it's working on whatever hardware the developers are using, but these days, I don't have the time I used to have, so I'll probably leave it alone till the beta, at which point, it usually works pretty smoothly for me, judging from past releases. I just don't have the time or energy to track down bugs and give the developers enough useful information to help them fix the issues I see, save for the minor ones where I can figure out the issue (usually a dependency that is supplied if one installs Gnome, but isn't marked as a particular dependency of that package.)

Mariusz W · #19 27th February 2011, 07:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by smr54

Unfortunately for those who own NVidia, this is where one gets bitten by Fedora's being, in many ways, a development platform. Adam W. has explained, quite eloquently, why this will sometimes happen, and I think most folks who use Fedora come to realize it--basically, right now, noveau is being forced upon us, making us into guinea pigs. The good part of this is that it will get it to be a really viable alternative more quickly than would happen if, for example, the xf86-video-nv was used, and people just either used that or got the proprietary.

The bad side, of course, is that it makes getting many machines with NVidia to work somewhat harder.

My own technique is to do a minimal install. Then I won't have to worry about X. Also, before rebooting (after installation), I use ctl+alt+f2 to get to a console, cd into /mnt/sysimage/etc/ and edit grub.conf to make sure it has nomodeset, and to also change the timeout from 0 to 3.

Now, I should be able to get a console. At that point, I can use Leigh's guide to get the regular NVidia driver working.

I'm sure there are other ways to do it, but at present, this is the one that I've found to be relatively easy for me. While I understand, and applaud Fedora's reasoning, it will, till noveau really gets working, make it somewhat more difficult on many machines with NVidia. I have the vague feeling that I've seen somewhere that the idea is to get it to go to VESA if noveau doesn't work, but I haven't seen that happen yet.

During the initial installation of Fedora on one of my computers I decided to go with nouveau. Does this make harder using Leigh's guide to install the proper nVidia driver later when one decides to do so -- in comparison with what you are proposing here, Scott?

smr54 · #20 27th February 2011, 02:23 PM

Hrrm, don't remember. I think that what I did was my usual minimal install. I don't remember if it wouldn't boot at that point, or only wouldn't boot after I added X. At that point, I added in the nomodeset, and used Leigh's method. I just remember missing the last part of Leigh's guide, (iwth dracut) and finding it still wasn't working, going back and finding it.

Sorry, that workstation was a relatively recent change at work, so I've only done one installation on it.

Palooka · #21 27th February 2011, 04:13 PM

I've successfully booted and installed the nightly build of the 64 bit Live CD (desktop x86_64-20110225.00.iso) into a VirtualBox VM.

One workaround I had to do was update Anaconda before running liveinst. That seemed to cause liveinst to disappear from the menus, so I just launched it from gnome-terminal.

Updates OK.

Haven't managed successfully to install the VBox Guest Additions yet, though.

Palooka