Live Fedora drops to debug shell; "conflicting fb hw usage radeondrmfb vs efi vga"

coldcaption · #1 14th October 2011, 06:23 PM

Hi!
So I'm getting a little crazed over how difficult it has been to get a working Linux distro on my ThinkPad X120e. With Mint, I got as far as having it installed (after the installer would consistently crash on GRUB, leaving me to install it myself with different live media), only to run into problems booting it (sometimes it didn't) as well as random, unpredictable freezes. Debian won't boot at all, and I tried Fedora first, but stopped when I had this problem. Now that I can't seem to find anything else, I'm going to try getting help beyond a Google search.

tl;dr; It gets past the GRUB screen just fine, passes the ISO integrity test, but crashes to a debug shell after the progress bar with "conflicting fb hw usage radeondrmfb vs efi vga." What can I do about this? I can't find anyone else who's had this problem; it seems that plenty of people have Fedora running on this machine just fine. Thanks!

sea · #2 14th October 2011, 06:32 PM

Are you having an ATI Radeon grafic card by chance on your ThinkPad?
You might try hitting tab on boot screen, and then type "enforce=0" in the terminal like thing, then hit enter.

If that doesnt help, you got....
Several options:
1) Try "Unetbootin" (works well on/for several plattforms), burn the iso to an USB, and choose "Text Install" if available, or "Install" directly otherwise.
2) Search for grafic errors during boot / grub
3) toggle onboard VGA, just to test IF it matters (if not, return to previous value)

HtH

coldcaption · #3 14th October 2011, 07:05 PM

Yes, my machine does have ATI graphics. On which screen would I press tab? 'Enforce' doesn't seem to be a command in grub or in the debug shell. I did use unetbootin to make the drive, as well. How do I search for graphic errors; am I looking for a message or things simply being displayed wrong? Grub renders with the pixels 1:1 rather than a scaled low-res, if that's of significance. Additionally, I looked through the BIOS settings and didn't see anything for onboard VGA. Is this the right place to look?

xaoslaad · #4 27th February 2012, 06:46 PM

Boot with EFI disabled if you can.

If you'd rather use EFI try modprobe.blacklist=radeon or radeon.modeset=0

If either of those work you're probably going to have to use fbdev for X though.

There are some bugs already in bugzilla about this, mostly regarding Mac's where I have seen this in the past.