Re: SL7.2 Live DVDkde would not boot

[Yasha Karant]

On 04/03/2016 11:20 AM, David Sommerseth wrote:

On 03/04/16 17:10, John Pilkington wrote:

I've had an interesting week with a new 3TB drive and a family box that has
been running MS Vista for years.  I disconnected the Windows HD 'for safety'
and installed kubuntu from the live DVD, with few problems until I tried a
'real' boot, which failed.  Eventually I installed buntu 14 with grub
alongside Vista on the original HD, and also have buntu 16 beta on the new
one; at present they will all boot and run.  Don't know if SL7 would do the
same.  But the USB drive exploit looks handy.

This should work on the majority of all Linux distributions, at least if you
use UUID for the /boot partitionsi.  Use of LVM can also simplify mounting the
root parition (/) and so on - unless you use UUID for those mount points too.

I've booted several old Linux installations from hardrives put into a USB
closure. I haven't tried to do that with Windows though, that might work too -
but somehow I imagine it will freak out at some point where drive letters
won't match properly.

To get an overview you can run 'blkid' or 'lsblk -o NAME,UUID' on your system
to see all devices and their unique UUID.  These tools are also valuable when
you need to modify /etc/crypttab manually.


--
kind regards,

David Sommerseth
Thank you for that approach, but what you describe does not seem to be 
what I am suggesting.


Rather, I was going to use dd in single user mode (does the old init 
method still work with the EL 7 replacement for
init to get to single user mode, scrolling text screen, no GUI, or is 
another mechanism required?) to make an image of my booting, working SL 
7.1 installation on a 1 Tbyte external USB drive.


Then, using the boot control screen of the target laptop -- well before 
any OS boots -- I was going to set the boot device to be
USB, plug the "bootable" dd'ed USB 1 Tbyte external drive into a USB 
port on the target machine, and boot from that.  If my
present system is bootable, etc., will not the dd'ed USB drive be 
bootable (except perhaps for that efi "chunk" issue I mentioned 
elsewhere and do have any
elucidation on that point) or do I need to worry about UUID, etc., 
issues with the dd'ed "copy"?  Are new UUIDs generated/required to boot 
such an

"imaged" external USB drive?

Regards,

Yasha Karant

Re: SL7.2 Live DVDkde would not boot

[David Sommerseth]

On 03/04/16 17:10, John Pilkington wrote:
>>
> 
> I've had an interesting week with a new 3TB drive and a family box that has
> been running MS Vista for years.  I disconnected the Windows HD 'for safety'
> and installed kubuntu from the live DVD, with few problems until I tried a
> 'real' boot, which failed.  Eventually I installed buntu 14 with grub
> alongside Vista on the original HD, and also have buntu 16 beta on the new
> one; at present they will all boot and run.  Don't know if SL7 would do the
> same.  But the USB drive exploit looks handy.

This should work on the majority of all Linux distributions, at least if you
use UUID for the /boot partitionsi.  Use of LVM can also simplify mounting the
root parition (/) and so on - unless you use UUID for those mount points too.

I've booted several old Linux installations from hardrives put into a USB
closure. I haven't tried to do that with Windows though, that might work too -
but somehow I imagine it will freak out at some point where drive letters
won't match properly.

To get an overview you can run 'blkid' or 'lsblk -o NAME,UUID' on your system
to see all devices and their unique UUID.  These tools are also valuable when
you need to modify /etc/crypttab manually.


--
kind regards,

David Sommerseth

Re: SL7.2 Live DVDkde would not boot

[Yasha Karant]

On 04/02/2016 10:36 PM, David G.Miller wrote:

Yasha Karant  writes:


An alternative approach -- if it will work.  Suppose I purchase a 1
Tbyte external USB drive (typically with a NTFS partition//format, but
this can be changed).
Suppose I install such a drive in the target machine that has MS Win 10
on the internal hard drive, and then, during the boot (secure boot
disabled, legacy boot enabled),
boot from the SL 7.2 install DVD.  Could I do the full install (I am not
worried about partitions, etc., yet -- merely for testing purposes) to
the USB drive, not touching the internal harddrive,
and, after the install, boot the machine from the external USB drive
(again, not touching the harddrive).  Is this feasible?  I fully
understand that an external USB drive machine will be "slower" than
a properly configured SATA internal harddrive machine -- but will this work?

Yasha Karant

On 04/02/2016 02:28 PM, Chris Schanzle wrote:

On 04/02/2016 01:25 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:

Other than stating that EL 7 will not work, are there any other
suggestions?

Best option is to remove the drive and put your own in for testing.

Alternatively, clone the drive with CloneZilla or if you're more
comfortable, "dd | gzip -1" and muck with it to your hearts
content...if you need to restore it to 'factory condition' just
restore your backup.

I do this with ANY new purchase...before turning the system on and
booting it up.




I did that for a few years with Fedora.  I still have a 400GB USB drive with
a couple of versions of Fedora on it (I "walked" forward my Fedora installs
so that I had a stable, previous version install on one set of partitions
and the latest, bleeding edge on another partition set).  I needed a newer
kernel than was shipping with SL/CentOS/RHEL at the time.  Just keep track
of which drive is which when you do the install and change your boot order
so the USB drive has priority if it's attached.

I tend to use this arrangement with my "work" laptops that come with Windows
installed by the IT department on the hard drive.  I boot the systems to
Linux on the external USB and can then escape from Windows when I feel the
need.

I also found the Linux install on an external drive is even portable between
hardware platforms so an option is to install to the external drive from so
other hardware and just boot the problem laptop from the external drive
after you've confirmed that the installation works.

Cheers,
Dave
I do not know the rules//customs of this list as to whether or not I 
should snip this.


Your last paragraph presents an option.  I have a 1 Tbyte SL 7.1 system 
on my professional (not consumer
Pavillion) with a "genuine" Intel I7 CPU (not the AMD CPU on the 
possible laptop for my wife).  If I simply got an external
1 Tbyte USB drive (e.g. a commodity Western Digital My Passport Ultra), 
and then, using my laptop that has a 1 Tbyte internal
drive, did a dd from my laptop to the external drive (a dd should copy 
all partitions, including boot) -- would this be bootable on the

target test machine?

If it is, and we elect to keep her machine, could I then, using her 
machine, do a dd from the external USB booted drive to the internal 1 
Tbyte drive of
her machine, producing a bootable Linux internal harddrive, or would 
there be a problem?  My machine does not have a EFI "chunk" on the 
harddrive,
and I have been told that without such a "chunk" -- wasted space -- a 
non EFI image will not boot on an EFI machine even if both Secure Boot 
is disabled
and Legacy Boot is enabled.  If this is the case, the image from my 
machine would not boot.  Any ideas or suggestions?


If the above would produce a booted SL 7.1 machine on my wife's new 
laptop, I presumably could put in the 7.2 install DVD and upgrade to 7.2 
without requiring the use
of a slow nextwork connection (at home, all we have is DSL -- and at my 
wife's university office, that theoretical has a 1 Gbit/sec 802.3 
connection, the actual throughput when
downloading the current 7.2 Live DVDkde ISO image was approximately 1 
Mbit/sec -- 1 percent of the nominal throughput -- mostly because the IT 
central administration fully
controlling network professionals at my institution have certain skill 
and knowledge issues that I shall not address here).


Would the above work or is the lack of an efi "chunk" a "deal breaker"?  
Can I install such an efi chunk on my machine (I have enough unused 
space in various partitions that I could use
gparted, for example, to free up such space -- if I know where the efi 
"chunk" needs to be (next to the MBR? anywhere on a bootable disk?) and 
from where to get an efi "chunk" image.


Yasha Karant

Re: SL7.2 Live DVDkde would not boot

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Sat, Apr 2, 2016 at 1:25 PM, Yasha Karant  wrote:
> There were two more postings by me with suffix [2] and then [3] pursuant to
> the situation with SL7.2 Live on this particular platform, including the
> Ubuntu description of the hardware.
> As far as I can tell, all of the important hardware (harddrive and
> controller, DVD reader/burner, WNIC, NIC, pointing device, video//graphics
> card, sound card, CPU including FPU and MMU, and USB devices) are linux
> supported, including in SL 7.  Have I missed something?  The BIOS are

You're missing the part that, until and unless the kernel supports the
particular chipsets, it can and will misreport the actual hardware.
This is a common problem, especially since the manufacturer of
particular can, and will, have the same hardware describe mismatched
names on the box, names on the hardware order forms, names in the
published Windows drivers depending on release, and names in MacOS and
Linux and UNIX kernels depending on who wrote them. And they also
change chipsets without telling anyone or renumbering the mother board
revision number. Been there, done that, actually scraped sealant and
hot glue off of chips to read the chip numbers.

> "secure boot", but that is a standard issue on current X86-64 hardware and
> "secure boot" (read, proprietary closed source vendor controlling) can be
> disabled for "legacy boot".  The issue that causes the dracut complaint is a
> missing file image on the RAMFS that a non-installed (e.g., live) system
> uses.  The Ubuntu test was with a USB flash drive -- would that make a
> difference?

Hard to tell. BIOS discovery of hardware is a programming horror show,
with closed source legacy components taking up resources better used
for cleaner, more modern versions but unchangeable for legacy
compatibility reasons. I *wish*

> As far as the older text-based installer, I fully concur with the respondent
> below.  A text based installer should at least be an option -- it worked
> much better.  However, the live non-installed system supposedly will not use
> the installer.  (I point out that the only enterprise competitor to EL is
> SLES, and SLES is much more GUI and automated than previous EL versions and
> also -- from direct experience -- is neither easy to configure nor properly
> supported except for large commercial-style configurations.  There also is
> no equivalent to this professional email list serve for any SuSE product to
> which I had even licensed access.)

The SL 7.1 and SL 7.2 installers are, in my recent observation,
*nasty*. They don't detect network devices correctly for VirtualBox
based VM's and network based installation, and I've had to use the SL
7.0 installer and http://vault.centos.org/7.0.1406/ as my upstream
repository for network based installation. This is not a SL problem,
it happens with CentOS as well.

> I understand that Ubuntu is not as stable as EL (although Ubuntu advertises
> support and at least at one point claimed that it could be used for
> production deployments -- something one dare not do with unstable
> non-hardened systems) -- but is the issue here simply one of the kernel and
> drivers?  Red Hat does certify EL 7 for laptops

For good reasons which you are enocuntering, yeah. And please, it's
called "RHEL" for a reason. Please use its actual name for
consistency.

> (
> https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/search/#/category/Laptop?sort=sortTitle%20asc&certifications=Red%20Hat%20Enterprise%20Linux%207&ecosystem=Red%20Hat%20Enterprise%20Linux
> ),
> but all I could find for EL 7 were products from Lenovo.   Lenovo is not
> that conservative in hardware, and certainly competes with both HP and Dell.

I'd urge you to discard vendor published "compatible with Linux"
recommendations. They're not reliable, because vendors change hardware
unannounced and because Linux tools grow more sophisticated.

> Other than stating that EL 7 will not work, are there any other suggestions?

Try SL 7.0 before being completely certain. Also, if you're putting
the ISO image on a USB installer, you're adding another variable.

Re: SL7.2 Live DVDkde would not boot

[Tom H]

On Sat, Apr 2, 2016 at 7:25 PM, Yasha Karant  wrote:
>
> There were two more postings by me with suffix [2] and then [3] pursuant to
> the situation with SL7.2 Live on this particular platform, including the
> Ubuntu description of the hardware.
>
> As far as I can tell, all of the important hardware (harddrive and
> controller, DVD reader/burner, WNIC, NIC, pointing device, video//graphics
> card, sound card, CPU including FPU and MMU, and USB devices) are linux
> supported, including in SL 7. Have I missed something? The BIOS are
> "secure boot", but that is a standard issue on current X86-64 hardware and
> "secure boot" (read, proprietary closed source vendor controlling) can be
> disabled for "legacy boot". The issue that causes the dracut complaint is a
> missing file image on the RAMFS that a non-installed (e.g., live) system
> uses. The Ubuntu test was with a USB flash drive -- would that make a
> difference?

You don't have to use "legacy boot." You can disable secure boot and
still boot in efi mode.

Like Anaconda, Ubiquity (the Ubuntu installer) will boot using bios or
efi hardware.


> As far as the older text-based installer, I fully concur with the respondent
> below. A text based installer should at least be an option -- it worked
> much better. However, the live non-installed system supposedly will not use
> the installer. (I point out that the only enterprise competitor to EL is
> SLES, and SLES is much more GUI and automated than previous EL versions and
> also -- from direct experience -- is neither easy to configure nor properly
> supported except for large commercial-style configurations. There also is
> no equivalent to this professional email list serve for any SuSE product to
> which I had even licensed access.)

I've given up on installer installs (except for kickstart) but, in
RHEL so I assume in SL, you can switch to the text installer by adding
"inst.text" to the Anaconda kernel cmdline. AFAIR, you won't have any
disk formatting options but you can pre-format a disk.


> I understand that Ubuntu is not as stable as EL (although Ubuntu advertises
> support and at least at one point claimed that it could be used for
> production deployments -- something one dare not do with unstable
> non-hardened systems) -- but is the issue here simply one of the kernel and
> drivers? Red Hat does certify EL 7 for laptops

Your understanding of Ubuntu's incorrect. The non-LTS versions might
not be as stable as EL but the LTS versions most certainly are.

AFAIUI, your problem's that the installer's failing to boot not that
EL 7 doesn't support your hardware.


> Other than stating that EL 7 will not work, are there any other suggestions?

Nico suggested that you try a 7.0 installer rather than a 7.1 or 7.2 one.

You could also boot from the Ubuntu live installer that you've already
used, install yum, and install EL 7 with "yum
--installroot=mount_of_el_7_root_partition ..." (preferably from a
local mirror).

Re: SL7.2 Live DVDkde would not boot

[John Pilkington]

re-sending to list

On 03/04/16 06:36, David G.Miller wrote:

Yasha Karant  writes:



An alternative approach -- if it will work.  Suppose I purchase a 1
Tbyte external USB drive (typically with a NTFS partition//format, but
this can be changed).
Suppose I install such a drive in the target machine that has MS Win 10
on the internal hard drive, and then, during the boot (secure boot
disabled, legacy boot enabled),
boot from the SL 7.2 install DVD.  Could I do the full install (I am not
worried about partitions, etc., yet -- merely for testing purposes) to
the USB drive, not touching the internal harddrive,
and, after the install, boot the machine from the external USB drive
(again, not touching the harddrive).  Is this feasible?  I fully
understand that an external USB drive machine will be "slower" than
a properly configured SATA internal harddrive machine -- but will this work?

Yasha Karant

On 04/02/2016 02:28 PM, Chris Schanzle wrote:

On 04/02/2016 01:25 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:

Other than stating that EL 7 will not work, are there any other
suggestions?


Best option is to remove the drive and put your own in for testing.

Alternatively, clone the drive with CloneZilla or if you're more
comfortable, "dd | gzip -1" and muck with it to your hearts
content...if you need to restore it to 'factory condition' just
restore your backup.

I do this with ANY new purchase...before turning the system on and
booting it up.





I did that for a few years with Fedora.  I still have a 400GB USB drive with
a couple of versions of Fedora on it (I "walked" forward my Fedora installs
so that I had a stable, previous version install on one set of partitions
and the latest, bleeding edge on another partition set).  I needed a newer
kernel than was shipping with SL/CentOS/RHEL at the time.  Just keep track
of which drive is which when you do the install and change your boot order
so the USB drive has priority if it's attached.

I tend to use this arrangement with my "work" laptops that come with Windows
installed by the IT department on the hard drive.  I boot the systems to
Linux on the external USB and can then escape from Windows when I feel the
need.

I also found the Linux install on an external drive is even portable between
hardware platforms so an option is to install to the external drive from so
other hardware and just boot the problem laptop from the external drive
after you've confirmed that the installation works.

Cheers,
Dave



I've had an interesting week with a new 3TB drive and a family box that 
has been running MS Vista for years.  I disconnected the Windows HD 'for 
safety' and installed kubuntu from the live DVD, with few problems until 
I tried a 'real' boot, which failed.  Eventually I installed buntu 14 
with grub alongside Vista on the original HD, and also have buntu 16 
beta on the new one; at present they will all boot and run.  Don't know 
if SL7 would do the same.  But the USB drive exploit looks handy.


John P

Re: SL7.2 Live DVDkde would not boot

[David G . Miller]

Yasha Karant  writes:

> 
> An alternative approach -- if it will work.  Suppose I purchase a 1 
> Tbyte external USB drive (typically with a NTFS partition//format, but 
> this can be changed).
> Suppose I install such a drive in the target machine that has MS Win 10 
> on the internal hard drive, and then, during the boot (secure boot 
> disabled, legacy boot enabled),
> boot from the SL 7.2 install DVD.  Could I do the full install (I am not 
> worried about partitions, etc., yet -- merely for testing purposes) to 
> the USB drive, not touching the internal harddrive,
> and, after the install, boot the machine from the external USB drive 
> (again, not touching the harddrive).  Is this feasible?  I fully 
> understand that an external USB drive machine will be "slower" than
> a properly configured SATA internal harddrive machine -- but will this work?
> 
> Yasha Karant
> 
> On 04/02/2016 02:28 PM, Chris Schanzle wrote:
> > On 04/02/2016 01:25 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
> >> Other than stating that EL 7 will not work, are there any other 
> >> suggestions? 
> >
> > Best option is to remove the drive and put your own in for testing.
> >
> > Alternatively, clone the drive with CloneZilla or if you're more 
> > comfortable, "dd | gzip -1" and muck with it to your hearts 
> > content...if you need to restore it to 'factory condition' just 
> > restore your backup.
> >
> > I do this with ANY new purchase...before turning the system on and 
> > booting it up.
> >
> 
> 
I did that for a few years with Fedora.  I still have a 400GB USB drive with
a couple of versions of Fedora on it (I "walked" forward my Fedora installs
so that I had a stable, previous version install on one set of partitions
and the latest, bleeding edge on another partition set).  I needed a newer
kernel than was shipping with SL/CentOS/RHEL at the time.  Just keep track
of which drive is which when you do the install and change your boot order
so the USB drive has priority if it's attached.

I tend to use this arrangement with my "work" laptops that come with Windows
installed by the IT department on the hard drive.  I boot the systems to
Linux on the external USB and can then escape from Windows when I feel the
need.  

I also found the Linux install on an external drive is even portable between
hardware platforms so an option is to install to the external drive from so
other hardware and just boot the problem laptop from the external drive
after you've confirmed that the installation works.

Cheers,
Dave

Re: SL7.2 Live DVDkde would not boot

[Yasha Karant]

An alternative approach -- if it will work.  Suppose I purchase a 1 
Tbyte external USB drive (typically with a NTFS partition//format, but 
this can be changed).
Suppose I install such a drive in the target machine that has MS Win 10 
on the internal hard drive, and then, during the boot (secure boot 
disabled, legacy boot enabled),
boot from the SL 7.2 install DVD.  Could I do the full install (I am not 
worried about partitions, etc., yet -- merely for testing purposes) to 
the USB drive, not touching the internal harddrive,
and, after the install, boot the machine from the external USB drive 
(again, not touching the harddrive).  Is this feasible?  I fully 
understand that an external USB drive machine will be "slower" than

a properly configured SATA internal harddrive machine -- but will this work?

Yasha Karant

On 04/02/2016 02:28 PM, Chris Schanzle wrote:

On 04/02/2016 01:25 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
Other than stating that EL 7 will not work, are there any other 
suggestions? 


Best option is to remove the drive and put your own in for testing.

Alternatively, clone the drive with CloneZilla or if you're more 
comfortable, "dd | gzip -1" and muck with it to your hearts 
content...if you need to restore it to 'factory condition' just 
restore your backup.


I do this with ANY new purchase...before turning the system on and 
booting it up.

Re: SL7.2 Live DVDkde would not boot

[Chris Schanzle]

On 04/02/2016 01:25 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
Other than stating that EL 7 will not work, are there any other suggestions? 


Best option is to remove the drive and put your own in for testing.

Alternatively, clone the drive with CloneZilla or if you're more comfortable, "dd | 
gzip -1" and muck with it to your hearts content...if you need to restore it to 
'factory condition' just restore your backup.

I do this with ANY new purchase...before turning the system on and booting it 
up.

Re: SL7.2 Live DVDkde would not boot

[Yasha Karant]

There were two more postings by me with suffix [2] and then [3] pursuant 
to the situation with SL7.2 Live on this particular platform, including 
the Ubuntu description of the hardware.
As far as I can tell, all of the important hardware (harddrive and 
controller, DVD reader/burner, WNIC, NIC, pointing device, 
video//graphics card, sound card, CPU including FPU and MMU, and USB 
devices) are linux supported, including in SL 7.  Have I missed 
something?  The BIOS are "secure boot", but that is a standard issue on 
current X86-64 hardware and "secure boot" (read, proprietary closed 
source vendor controlling) can be disabled for "legacy boot".  The issue 
that causes the dracut complaint is a missing file image on the RAMFS 
that a non-installed (e.g., live) system uses.  The Ubuntu test was with 
a USB flash drive -- would that make a difference?


As far as the older text-based installer, I fully concur with the 
respondent below.  A text based installer should at least be an option 
-- it worked much better.  However, the live non-installed system 
supposedly will not use the installer.  (I point out that the only 
enterprise competitor to EL is SLES, and SLES is much more GUI and 
automated than previous EL versions and also -- from direct experience 
-- is neither easy to configure nor properly supported except for large 
commercial-style configurations.  There also is no equivalent to this 
professional email list serve for any SuSE product to which I had even 
licensed access.)


I understand that Ubuntu is not as stable as EL (although Ubuntu 
advertises support and at least at one point claimed that it could be 
used for production deployments -- something one dare not do with 
unstable non-hardened systems) -- but is the issue here simply one of 
the kernel and drivers?  Red Hat does certify EL 7 for laptops
( 
https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/search/#/category/Laptop?sort=sortTitle%20asc&certifications=Red%20Hat%20Enterprise%20Linux%207&ecosystem=Red%20Hat%20Enterprise%20Linux 
),
but all I could find for EL 7 were products from Lenovo.   Lenovo is not 
that conservative in hardware, and certainly competes with both HP and Dell.


Other than stating that EL 7 will not work, are there any other suggestions?

Yasha Karant

On 04/02/2016 04:40 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:

On Sat, Apr 2, 2016 at 12:00 AM, Yasha Karant  wrote:

SL-72-x86_64-2016-02-03-LiveDVDkde.iso would not boot on a HP Pavilion
Laptop Computer  model N5R26UA#ABA, although the list of hardware on the
machine should have been supported by SL 7.  Fortunately, one of my students
works at the store selling the machine, and his manager had a bootable USB
flash drive with several 64 bit linuxes on it.  Both ubuntu and mint booted,
so, presumably SL 7 should boot.  The DVD image was verified/tested before
using it.

Below is the (rather long) journalctl output from the attempt to boot SL 7
-- can anyone identify what is failing and how to fix it?  We have 14 days
to return the machine for full credit provided I do not modify the harddrive
(that I shall not do unless we keep the machine and install SL 7).

Any suggestions?  Is  there a way to test boot, without install, including
X, from the 4 Gbyte regular SL7.2 install DVD (after burning the iso file to
a DVD)?

Yasha Karant

[Very long records deleted]

First: SL, like hte upsteam RHEL, is really a stable server grade
operating system. The kernels will never be bleeding edge, with the
latest support for the latest laptop chipsets, many of which tended to
be very leading edge and off-brand. And Ubuntu tends to be leading
edge: they're not very stable for server grade systems, but rather
tend to the latest chipsets.

Second. the heavily reduced kernel and configs used by Anaconda for
the boot operating configurations can be. problematic. I've also
had problems with 7. and 7.2, that did *not* happen with 7.0. In fact,
I just installled a server with 7.0 successfully, and was able to
update, when 7.1 and 7.2 CD's were unable to boot it.

Third: the "rescue" mode should still be available, adding the word
"rescue" to the boot kernel options. I really wish they'd list rescue
mode, and *not* on that ghods-awful X based "spoke and wheel" logic
installer. The older, text based installer worked very well, took up
much less screen space, was easier to read, and had consistent layout.
It also worked *much better* for remote consoles and
virtualizatization consoles.

Re: SL7.2 Live DVDkde would not boot

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Sat, Apr 2, 2016 at 12:00 AM, Yasha Karant  wrote:
> SL-72-x86_64-2016-02-03-LiveDVDkde.iso would not boot on a HP Pavilion
> Laptop Computer  model N5R26UA#ABA, although the list of hardware on the
> machine should have been supported by SL 7.  Fortunately, one of my students
> works at the store selling the machine, and his manager had a bootable USB
> flash drive with several 64 bit linuxes on it.  Both ubuntu and mint booted,
> so, presumably SL 7 should boot.  The DVD image was verified/tested before
> using it.
>
> Below is the (rather long) journalctl output from the attempt to boot SL 7
> -- can anyone identify what is failing and how to fix it?  We have 14 days
> to return the machine for full credit provided I do not modify the harddrive
> (that I shall not do unless we keep the machine and install SL 7).
>
> Any suggestions?  Is  there a way to test boot, without install, including
> X, from the 4 Gbyte regular SL7.2 install DVD (after burning the iso file to
> a DVD)?
>
> Yasha Karant

[Very long records deleted]

First: SL, like hte upsteam RHEL, is really a stable server grade
operating system. The kernels will never be bleeding edge, with the
latest support for the latest laptop chipsets, many of which tended to
be very leading edge and off-brand. And Ubuntu tends to be leading
edge: they're not very stable for server grade systems, but rather
tend to the latest chipsets.

Second. the heavily reduced kernel and configs used by Anaconda for
the boot operating configurations can be. problematic. I've also
had problems with 7. and 7.2, that did *not* happen with 7.0. In fact,
I just installled a server with 7.0 successfully, and was able to
update, when 7.1 and 7.2 CD's were unable to boot it.

Third: the "rescue" mode should still be available, adding the word
"rescue" to the boot kernel options. I really wish they'd list rescue
mode, and *not* on that ghods-awful X based "spoke and wheel" logic
installer. The older, text based installer worked very well, took up
much less screen space, was easier to read, and had consistent layout.
It also worked *much better* for remote consoles and
virtualizatization consoles.

SL7.2 Live DVDkde would not boot [3]

[Yasha Karant]

Just in case this helps, first, the HP description of the hardware, and 
then, the Ubuntu description (note that the machine is "Ubuntu 
certified" that seems to be correct in that
64 bit Ubuntu did boot and an Xwindows GUI window manager was 
operational).  Again, any assistance would be most appreciated.


Yasha Karant

HP:

http://support.hp.com/us-en/product/HP-Pavilion-15-Notebook-PC-series/8499302/model/8857403/document/c04773160#AbT1

Hardware
*Product Name*

15-ab153nr
*Product Number*

N5R26UA
*Microprocessor*

1.8GHz up to 3.2gHz AMD Quad-Core A10-8700P APU
*Microprocessor Cache*

2MB L2 Cache
*Memory*

8GB DDR3L SDRAM (1 DIMM)
*Video Graphics*

AMD Radeon R6 graphics with up to 4352MB total graphics memory
*Display*

15.6-inch diagonal HD BrightView WLED-backlit display (1366x768)
*Hard Drive*

1TB 5400RPM hard drive
*Multimedia Drive*

SuperMulti DVD burner
*Network Card*

Integrated 10/100 BASE-T Ethernet LAN
*Wireless Connectivity*

1x1 802.11b/g/n WLAN and Bluetooth
*Sound*

B&O PLAY with dual speakers
*Keyboard*

Full-size island-style keyboard with numeric keypad
*Pointing Device*

HP Imagepad with multi-touch gesture support
*External Ports*

1 multi-format SD media card reader
2 SuperSpeed USB 3.0, 1 supporting USB Boost
1 Universal Serial Bus (USB) 2.0
1 HDMI
1 RJ-45 (LAN)
1 Headphone-out/microphone-in combo jack
**


Ubuntu:

http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/hardware/201307-13902/


   Hardware summary

This system was tested with these key components:

Processor   

AMD processor AMD A4-5000 APU with Radeon(TM) HD Graphics 



Video   

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Kabini [Radeon HD 8330] 



Ethernet

Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast 
Ethernet controller 



Wireless

Atheros Communications AR9485 Wireless Network Adapter 




   Hardware details

Accelerometer   

Unknown ST LIS3LV02DL Accelerometer 



Audio   

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Kabini HDMI/DP Audio 



Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] FCH Azalia Controller 



Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] FCH Azalia Controller 



Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Hudson Azalia Controller 



Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Kabini HDMI/DP Audio 



Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Unknown 



BIOS

Insyde B.0C 



Board   

Hewlett-Packard 216F 



Capture 

Cheng Uei Precision Industry Co., Ltd (Foxlink) None 



Cardreader  

Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS5229 PCI Express Card Reader 



Cdrom   

Advanced Silicon S.A. hp DVDRAM GU70N 



Unknown hp DVDRAM GU70N 



Chassis 

Hewlett-Packard Notebook 



Disk

Advanced Silicon S.A. ST320LT012-9WS14C 



Unknown ST320LT012-9WS14C 



Keyboard

Advanced Silicon S.A. AT Translated Set 2 keyboard 



Unknown AT Translated Set 2 keyboard 



Network 

Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast 
Ethernet controller 

SL7.2 Live DVDkde would not boot [2]

[Yasha Karant]

I just verified that the SL7.2 Live DVDkde DVD I burned does boot on my 
SL 7.1 HP laptop -- very slow, but it does boot and bring up KDE.  
During the failed boot process, there was a specific file mentioned to 
post as a "bug report", rdsosreport.txt .  This file also is long, but 
it appears here for reference.  Any ideas how to fix this? Would a USB 
stick boot work?  The machine currently has MS Win 10, but if we decide 
to keep it, I would reformat the drive as a Linux only machine, with MS 
Win running as a guest under VirtualBox or the like. At the end of the 
output below appears Warning: /dev/disk/by-label/SL-72-x86_64-LiveDVDkde 
does not exist ,   This is correct; a manual inspection of 
/dev/disk-by-label/ shows windows, etc., but no SL file.


Any assistance would be most appreciated.

Yasha Karant

+ cat /lib/dracut/dracut-033-360.el7_2
dracut-033-360.el7_2
+ cat /proc/cmdline
initrd=initrd0.img root=live:CDLABEL=SL-72-x86_64-LiveDVDkde 
rootfstype=auto ro rd.live.image quiet  rhgb rd.luks=0 rd.md=0 rd.dm=0  
BOOT_IMAGE=vmlinuz0

+ '[' -f /etc/cmdline ']'
+ for _i in '/etc/cmdline.d/*.conf'
+ '[' -f '/etc/cmdline.d/*.conf' ']'
+ break
+ cat /proc/self/mountinfo
1 1 0:1 / / rw shared:1 - rootfs rootfs rw
18 1 0:17 / /sys rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime shared:2 - sysfs sysfs rw
19 1 0:3 / /proc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime shared:7 - proc proc rw
20 1 0:5 / /dev rw,nosuid shared:8 - devtmpfs devtmpfs 
rw,size=3745572k,nr_inodes=936393,mode=755
21 18 0:16 / /sys/kernel/security rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 
shared:3 - securityfs securityfs rw

22 20 0:18 / /dev/shm rw,nosuid,nodev shared:9 - tmpfs tmpfs rw
23 20 0:11 / /dev/pts rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime shared:10 - devpts 
devpts rw,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000

24 1 0:19 / /run rw,nosuid,nodev shared:11 - tmpfs tmpfs rw,mode=755
25 18 0:20 / /sys/fs/cgroup ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec shared:4 - tmpfs 
tmpfs ro,mode=755
26 25 0:21 / /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 
shared:5 - cgroup cgroup 
rw,xattr,release_agent=/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-cgroups-agent,name=systemd
27 18 0:22 / /sys/fs/pstore rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime shared:6 - 
pstore pstore rw
28 25 0:23 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 
shared:12 - cgroup cgroup rw,cpuset
29 25 0:24 / /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 
shared:13 - cgroup cgroup rw,hugetlb
30 25 0:25 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu,cpuacct rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 
shared:14 - cgroup cgroup rw,cpuacct,cpu
31 25 0:26 / /sys/fs/cgroup/net_cls rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 
shared:15 - cgroup cgroup rw,net_cls
32 25 0:27 / /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 
shared:16 - cgroup cgroup rw,perf_event
33 25 0:28 / /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 
shared:17 - cgroup cgroup rw,blkio
34 25 0:29 / /sys/fs/cgroup/devices rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 
shared:18 - cgroup cgroup rw,devices
35 25 0:30 / /sys/fs/cgroup/memory rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 
shared:19 - cgroup cgroup rw,memory
36 25 0:31 / /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 
shared:20 - cgroup cgroup rw,freezer
37 1 0:32 / /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs rw,relatime shared:21 - rpc_pipefs 
rpc_pipefs rw

59 18 0:33 / /sys/kernel/config rw,relatime shared:22 - configfs configfs rw
+ cat /proc/mounts
rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0
proc /proc proc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0
devtmpfs /dev devtmpfs rw,nosuid,size=3745572k,nr_inodes=936393,mode=755 0 0
securityfs /sys/kernel/security securityfs 
rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0

tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts 
rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000 0 0

tmpfs /run tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev,mode=755 0 0
tmpfs /sys/fs/cgroup tmpfs ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,mode=755 0 0
cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd cgroup 
rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,xattr,release_agent=/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-cgroups-agent,name=systemd 
0 0

pstore /sys/fs/pstore pstore rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0
cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset cgroup 
rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,cpuset 0 0
cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb cgroup 
rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,hugetlb 0 0
cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu,cpuacct cgroup 
rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,cpuacct,cpu 0 0
cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/net_cls cgroup 
rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,net_cls 0 0
cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event cgroup 
rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,perf_event 0 0

cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio cgroup rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,blkio 0 0
cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/devices cgroup 
rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,devices 0 0
cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/memory cgroup 
rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,memory 0 0
cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer cgroup 
rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,freezer 0 0

rpc_pipefs /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs rpc_pipefs rw,relatime 0 0
configfs /sys/kernel/config configfs rw,relatime 0 0
+ blkid
/dev/sda1: LABEL="SYSTEM" UUID="5E84-4728" TYPE="vfat" PARTLABEL="EFI 
system par