Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 138713
Installer shows blank screen in text AND GUI mode
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:54 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) Description of problem: On install, Linux loads, lots of stuff goes scrolling by. If you look carefully you can see something like "vesa probe failed: error(- 6)". Loading completes, and the screen blanks, but nothing else happens. Nothing is displayed onscreen in either text or GUI mode. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Download Fedora Core 3 final release DVD image, burn to DVD 2. Insert DVD, reboot computer 3. Load installer with boot:linux, boot:linux text Actual Results: Installer loads, comes up with blank screen Expected Results: Installer should have came on screen in either text or GUI mode Additional info: Acer Ferrari 3200 laptop computer Video card is an ATI Radeon Mobility 9700. Processor is an Athlon 64 Mobile 2800+. 512 MB 333 DDR ram 80 GB hard drive
Does booting with 'linux nofb' help?
booted with boot:linux video=vesafb:nomtrr vga=0x317 Installer came up perfectly and the installed kernel worked perfectly.
I don't understand - why is this 'WORKSFORME' ? Working only on specification of some obscure option doesn't seem like WFM.
Well, in the install notes for Fedora Core 3 and 4, it mentions the "linux nofb" option, which works (and is a whole lot easier to type than that other mess i came up with). It's something peculiar to laptop displays I think, because I've never had it occur on any of the desktop machines I've used linux on. Also it's something relatively recent, because Fedora Core 2 didn't do this. I'm not very familiar with Bugzilla, and if I remember right, it defaulted to WORKSFORME. Should I change it?
WORKSFORME is reasonable -- we're looking at removing the vga16fb stuff for FC5 which would make thsi problem go away