[Mageia-discuss] Mageia 2 Experiences

[Frank Griffin]

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.