On 04/25/2012 06:51 PM, imnotpc wrote:
I don't really have a lot of clues to offer. After installation it goes through the boot sequence and fails with either a blank screen for the default ATI driver, or a multi-color pixelated screen with the vesa driver. I've never seen the vesa driver lock up before.
If you boot a rescue CD, mount the root partition, change the runlevel in /etc/inittab to 3 rather than 5, and reboot, do you get to a login prompt with no problem ? If so, your problem is in starting X, most likely related to the ATI video card.
Check /boot/grub/menu.lst to see if the entry you're booting has the kernel parm "nokmsboot". If it doesn't, add it. None of the free drivers for ATI will work without this. Cauldron is adding this now, but I don't know about b3. The radeon driver still won't work, but it won't misbehave as badly. The vesa driver may work then.
From the command line, add the nonfree repositories and install both the fglrx driver and the kernel-firmware-nonfree. If that works, then you just have an ATI chip that won't work with vesa.
At times I've managed to get to the command line and discovered that in addition the networking won't work, either wired or wireless. I'd gladly submit a bug report or comment on an existing one, but I don't know where to start on this one.
From either a tty command line or a root terminal window, run drakconnect. See whether the NetworkManager box is checked in the options panel for the wired interface. If it is, uncheck it, complete drakconnect and run "service networkmanager stop" and "systemctl disable NetworkManager.service". Then reboot and see if it comes up. Same for wireless.
If your NICs worked under mga1, NM is most likely the culprit.
