[Mageia-dev] M3 beta - where to report problems?

[Frank Griffin]

On 04/08/2013 12:52 PM, Anne Wilson wrote:
> Something very odd is happening, indeed.  Remember this was a
> functioning system before I did the updates.
>
> Rebooting, nothing has changed.  I get grub, lots of disk activity led
> flickering, but no output to the screen, with or without Esc.  I can
> boot into Safe moade, which lands me in Rescue Mode - but I haven't a
> clue what to do next.
>
>
If you don't even get text mode, this sounds like the old problem of 
radeon drivers which require nonfree firmware not having the firmware 
available.  There was a long stretch where, if you had such a card, you 
needed to install with the x11 vesa driver, boot, install the firmware, 
and then use XFdrake to switch to the radeon driver.

Do you have a card that uses the radeon driver ?  If so, did you enable 
nonfree during the upgrade ?

You can try the following:

1) Boot the rescue system
2) drvinst
3) mount your root as /mnt
4) do a "mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
5) do a "chroot /mnt"
6) do a "mount -t proc none /proc"
7) do a "mount -t sysfs none /sys"
8) do "XFdrake"
9) choose the x11 VESA or VGA driver (way down at bottom of list)
10) reboot and see if TTY mode now works

If it does, then add nonfree as a urpmi repository and install the 
nonfree radeon firmware package.  Then run XFdrake in the real system to 
set yourself back to the radeon driver that XFdrake should default to.

If you're not using radeon, you may want to do (1) - (10) anyway just to 
see if your system works with the basic driver.