Textmode garbled, wonky framebuffer (?) at startup

DopeGhoti

Greetings.

I spent the last couple days slogging though the install with the assistance of the Installation Handbook, but have run into several snags along the way, and was wondering if anyone here might have some advice.

I installed from the smaller of the CD images which just has the stage 1 tarball on it.

When booting the CD, the default kernel would hardlock the computer (which is to say, no keyboard intervention - even a three-finger-salute - would work) at the Gentoo logo with an empty (what I assumed to be) progress bar. Just to be sure I wasn't impatient, I left it there for 10 minutes once, to no effect.

So I started fiddling with the other boot options the CD gave me.

'nofb' got a little farther, but locked when it started probing for USB hardware.

I have no USB devices plugged into the computer.

I finally got going with 'nofb nousb' and, things were more or less smooth from there until I got to the point where I roll my own kernel for the computer. After wrestling with genkernel aborting whilst compiling kernel modules, bit the bullet and configured a kernel manually. A couple kernels later, I had myself a viable Gentoo box running a gentoo-sources kernel.

At this point, the system seem to be (fairly) stable and running, but I still am having an issue at bootup-

When the system boots, I just get a blinking cursor in the upper left. If I press Enter (or wait 30 seconds), the bootup gets going, which indicates to me that GRUB is doing its job.

However (and here's the part were I need your assistance), all the text onscreen is garbled- there is what cna best be described as white-noise overlaying the text on the screen, as though the font were somehow corrupted. This is reinforced later on in the boot process when it abruptly snaps back to readable text.

Any help would be greatly apreciated!

DopeGhoti · Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2004 11:29 pm Post subject:

I thought I'd give this a nudge, as it's almost on page 2 already, and more people are actually on the Forums now. I really want to get this problem solved, people!

bma · n00b Joined: 08 Jul 2003 Posts: 15 Location: USA

check your grub.conf file in /boot/grub. make sure your line for splashimage is correct. here's mine:

DopeGhoti · Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2004 11:41 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the tip! I'll take a look at it when I get home in an hour and change and see if that's the culprit. I'd check now, but my SSH daemon seems not to like me, at least from here.

DopeGhoti · Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2004 2:53 am Post subject:

here is my grub.conf:

DopeGhoti · Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2004 4:26 am Post subject:

Just to confirm whether it is or is not, in fact, the framebuffer, I took out the spash image line in the grub.conf.

Booting up entirely in textmode seems to work perfectly normally, but this doesn't bode well for use of X in the (hopefully) near future.

Is there somehting specific I should be doing to not have some sort of conflict with a GeForce4 Ti 4400?

FreeFly42 · l33t Joined: 03 Nov 2003 Posts: 848 Location: Houston, TX

You may just have a bad grub splash image. For a moment don't worry about it, as long as you can boot. The grub splash only requires a vga monitor (640x480 16 colors). The live boot cd by default uses 1024x768 for it's framebuffer mode. If you want to find out if any framebuffer will work, boot from the live cd and when you get to the "boot:" prompt, type "800 nousb" and it will try to boot with an 800x600 resolution. If this won't work it doesn't mean you're hopeless for X, it just means your hardware isn't vesa compliant. Not the end of the world, but you're going to have to do some work to make sure you have the right X drivers loaded.

Now, a GeForce4 Ti 4400 will work extremely well in Linux, especially with the nvidia drivers (rather than the nv drivers which come with XFree). The fact that this is your card leads me to the conclusion that it is your monitor that won't support the vesa modes which the cd is trying to load.

USB stuff will often b0rk if you have the "enable legacy usb support" configuration wrong in your BIOS. Whatever you have you may want to try the opposite.

The framebuffer driver is actually loaded as a kernel option, which may require some work. See this thread for a discusson on framebuffer & bootsplash support.
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DopeGhoti · Posted: Mon Jan 19, 2004 3:29 am Post subject:

Once OpenOffice is done emerging, I"ll try your trick with the LiveCD. X (with KDE) is working grandly, I'm happy to say; I'm just trying to retroactively solve a problem so that it won't trouble me when I somehow b0rk this box and need to reinstall from stage 1

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