[Mageia-discuss] Mageia 2 Experiences

[Frank Griffin]

On 04/26/2012 07:50 AM, imnotpc wrote:
> On 04/25/2012 10:32 PM, Frank Griffin wrote:
>> 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 ?
>
> No, it locks up with a blank screen. The last line I could read before 
> it went blank was "Starting speech dispatcher..."
>
> If I boot using safe mode the system doesn't lock, but doesn't give me 
> a command prompt either. The last message is "Failed to issue method 
> call: Transaction is destructive."

OK, there may be several issues in play here.

Cauldron currently starts plymouth on tty1 to display boot messages, and 
I think the design relies on a Display Manager (GDM, KDM) signalling 
plymouth to exit, so if you boot to runlevel 3 (where no DM is staretd, 
plymouth currently hangs around on tty1, and it looks like it's hung.  
However, if you do ALT-F2 (or 3, 4, etc), switching to an available tty 
that isn't running X should start getty there and give you a login prompt.

What I'm trying to determine is whether your line-mode tty video works 
without X in the picture.

If you could read "Starting speech dispatcher", then your tty was 
working, and the blank screen was probably the result of starting X.  
Maybe with systemd now, there is a different way of setting the 
runlevel.  Try booting in safe mode, doing ALT-F2, logging in as root, 
and running XFdrake.  Then uncheck the box which says start graphical 
mode at boot, and try again.

The "Transaction is destructive" thing is a known open bug.


>> If your NICs worked under mga1, NM is most likely the culprit.
>>
>
> I install over the network so the wired NIC is working during 
> installation. The wireless NICs work as well but they usually need 
> firmware installed first. I'll take a look at this once I can reliably 
> get that far. Thanks for the help.
>

If the wired NIC works during installation, then it doesn't need 
firmware, and there's no reason it shouldn't work in the new system.

It's common for wireless to take a few reboots, since the install 
doesn't detect wireless and install everything it should.  Instead, when 
you run drakconnect to add the wireless interface, it kicks urpmi to 
install wireless-tools and some other packages.  It also detects your 
wireless NIC, and modifies boot files to load the appropriate kernel 
driver (if it recognizes it).

So it's not unusual for the initial attempt at adding wlan0 to show only 
"Use a windows driver with ndiswrapper" until you reboot and the kernel 
recognizes the device.  Then using drakconnect should show your actual 
device.

I haven't used any NICs that require firmware not included with the 
install, so I don't know how automatic that is.

Once you get to the point of defining eth0 or wlan0 and not having it 
come up, you can do the checks for NM.