From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT; DigExt) Description of problem: I cannot get the RedHat 7.1 installer to install in graphical mode on a Dell Poweredge 5166-2 that uses an ATI Mach64 card with 1MB memory. It has an onboard SymBIOS SCSI card and an Adaptec 2940 card with an ST32550N disk on each SCSI card. It is fitted with a standard keyboard and MS intellimouse. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Insert CD and boot floppy 2. Use either expert mode or press enter 3. Wait Actual Results: Running anaconda - please wait... Probing for mouse type... Waiting for X server to start...log located in /tmp/X.log ... X server started successfully. Gdk-ERROR **: Fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server :1. install exited abnormally sending termination signals ... done sending kill signals ... done disabling swap ... unmounting filesystems ... /mnt/runtime /mnt/source umount failed () /dev/pts /proc you may safely reboot your system Expected Results: I should have been able to get into the graphical installer. Additional info: I have tried this with a RedHat 7.1 evaluation CD that was given to me at Linux Expo. I have tried installing off an ISO image on a hard disk, but of course this will not run in graphical mode. I've created CDs from these ISO images using EasyCD creator and Nero, but again the same result occurs (however, the "MD5sum" of these CDs does not match the ISO images) I need to be able to install in graphical mode as that is the only way to set up software RAID. I can install RedHat 6.2 in graphical mode, and upgrade to 7.1, but this shows all kinds of errors in the upgrade log. I have been trying the vga= options also to no avail. I am in the process of purchasing the full version of RedHat 7.1 to test this further.
I'd be curious to know if the retail version works. There's no reason that the evaluation cd's shouldn't work, though. Although it sounds like the cd's you burned from the ISO's may not have the same md5sums as the original ISO's. That would pretty much guarantee that they wouldn't work. If the graphical installer won't work, there's always text mode, which should get you an installed system.
I think you missed my point. I CAN'T USE TEXT MODE INSTALLATION AS I WANT TO INSTALL SOFTWARE RAID. (Sorry for shouting). Disk Druid in text mode gives no options for setting up RAID devices. Perhaps this might be a future enhancement?
Oh sorry. We have added text mode support for setting up software raid in the next version of Red Hat Linux, and in my haste I forgot that 7.1 didn't have that capability. My mistake. Did you try booting with 'linux nofb'?
Yes thanks. I've tried linux nofb, linux vga=788, linux vga=773 and lowres. The latter is unusable. I'm glad to hear that RedHat 7.2 can install software raid in text mode, although it would have been good to know that before I ordered 7.1! I suggest we leave this one until I receive my copy of 7.1 (unless of course 7.2 is imminent!) This is the system specification for my machine: http://support.euro.dell.com/docs/dta/pesp53/00000001.htm I have two more of these to install!
Well if you are interested, you can try out Roswell (the public beta for the next release of Red Hat Linux) at ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/roswell/en/iso/i386/ I'd be interested to know if your problem is solved in Roswell. I can't give specific dates for the next release, but traditionally we do a release every six months or so, and 7.1 was released in April, so I think you can put two and two together. :) Having said that, I'm very surprised that you had problems with 7.1 on the PowerEdge machines. We have a test lab full of PowerEdge hardware that have all been certified as compatible with Red Hat Linux. I know for certain that the ATI Mach64 1MB cards work. It seems that the problems you are seeing are related to the video card and the X Window server, but I can't imagine why it isn't working.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'm already trying to download it, however at 01:15 this am (UTC) the roswell directory above had its file permissions changed so that no-one can get into it. Can this be fixed please? I've tried four times to download from ftp.mirror.ac.uk, two of these failed and the other two give the same md5 checksum, but these do not match the MD5SUM file. I'm trying again with an ftp client rather than a browser and I hope to have more success. Because of the imminent release of RedHat 7.2 we may well be exchanging 7.1. That is likely to arrive today.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'm already trying to download it, however at 01:15 this am (UTC) the roswell directory above had its file permissions changed so that no-one can get into it. Can this be fixed please? I've tried four times to download from ftp.mirror.ac.uk, two of these failed and the other two give the same md5 checksum, but these do not match the MD5SUM file. I'm trying again with an ftp client rather than a browser and I hope to have more success. I have tried to install with a different CD-ROM drive and a different video card, but I get the same result. Because of the imminent release of RedHat 7.2 we may well be exchanging 7.1. That is likely to arrive today.
I can't explain why the IS team would remove read permissions to the Roswell beta. That doesn't make sense to me. At any rate, it can be downloaded from the University of North Carolina at: ftp://jungle.metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/distributions/redhat/beta/roswell/en/iso/i386/ They should have a pretty fast connection. Let me know if that works out for you.
Any luck here?
Sorry to leave it so long. I couldn't download from this site as it was too slow for us here, so I burned the ISO images I obtained from ftp.mirror.ac.uk. The MD5SUM file at this site contains the following: 1b6a16dde304e2cc8b1d1d0285e5d58c roswell-i386-disc1.iso 291ea51d5cf8b3a33b0bb7652c1f5fd8 roswell-i386-disc2.iso But the packages I downloaded give this: f8b7ca42d7df6d830ac91c66957da743 roswell-i386-disc1.iso 2b998cbdf760a4f01b34b6419020a01d roswell-i386-disc2.iso Burning the CD and running MD5sum gives another result altogether! Roswell was successful at installing in graphical mode, however I still cannot get X-windows working with this card. The machine now has the evil NT4.0 installed (on another SCSI disk) and the graphics card works fine. (I'm only installing it because I need to test the pathetic update system that MS has. It's not staying on, honest!) I'm waiting for RH 7.2 to be released now. (The order for 7.1 was lost, so I'll be issuing a new order soon).
Hmm...I know that the ATI model of video card that you have should work. We have a lab full of PowerEdge machines that work fine with Seawolf as well as Roswell. The md5sum mismatches give me some concern that the cd's themselves could be the source of some of the problems. I'll leave this in NEEDINFO until you get a chance to try 7.2 Final. I'd be really surprised if the video card doesn't work correctly...
I've received my copy of RedHat 7.2 today, (and have downloaded the iso images correctly from ftp.mirror.ac.uk as well). However, it has already crashed on startup using standard and lowres options. There might be some kind of hardware fault on this machine, although both RedHat 6.2 and NT4.0 (yuk!) install OK. I am getting an error probing the monitor, so it is even possible that the monitor or hardware are faulty. My next two attempts will be to try again with a different monitor, and to try again with different hardware.
At this point, I'm hoping its hardware related. I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't work. Like I said, the PowerEdge line was tested thoroughly.
Changing the monitor didn't help. I'm now installing on an older PowerEdge that only has dual P100 support, and apparently a Mach32 card (only .5MB ram). This hasn't caused any problems so far. I'm 99% certain that there is something in the probe of hardware that my particular card doesn't like. I have one other identical machine which I'll swap the motherboard out of later and see what happens.
I've just had the crash occur again when I put an adaptec 2910C card in my machine with the Mach-32 card. Is there some conflict between the mach-32/64 code and the aic7xxx code? I'll try again tomorrow on the original machine by removing the 2940 card and putting both disks on the built in SCSI controller. I bet it will work!
I don't know of any conflict between the two, except that they might both be using the same IRQ, and that might cause a problem. But the drivers are two completely separate pieces of code, so I don't think they are conflicting. If the machine works without the 2940 card, then I would start suspecting that something is fishy either with the card itself, or with the driver for that card. If it's a driver problem, then this bug report should be reassigned to the kernel team, since they handle the kernel and the related drivers. Any luck after removing the card?
I've taken Occam's Razor to the machine, ie I removed everything except the CD- Rom, floppy drive and one IDE hard disk. The on-board SCSI was disabled in the BIOS. I left the motherboard in ;-) Now here comes the rub. RedHat 7.1 and 7.2 won't install graphically. Redhat 7.1.94 (ie Roswell) does! I've played with the BIOS settings for the on-board VGA. Would the 7.1.94 boot disk be able to install 7.2, or am I asking too much?
Hmm...it might work. It probably has a slightly different kernel. It may work; it may not. Give it a try....Keep a fire extinguisher handy ;)
Any more info here?
Sorry about the delay. Fortunately my desk is by the fire extinguishers (and I've been trained in using them). Anyway, using the Roswell boot CD to install 7.2 didn't work and the fire extinguishers are still in place. For the machine in question I've decided that I'll install workstation without Gnome or KDE, since even a text-only install cannot run Xwindows at all. Until I decommission an identical machine at the end of the month (I hope) I can't be sure that this isn't a hardware issue. I'll keep you informed.
So far I've been unable to try out the installer on another identical machine. I hope to decommision this machine soon, so possibly next week I'll get onto it.
Any progress here?
Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. The second machine won't install in graphical mode either, and I doubt that the third one will either. I'll be moving onto that one soon. The original problem, not being able to install software RAID has gone away now that the Enigma installer can manage that in text mode. However, there have been changes to the Enigma installer and/or XFree86 since Roswell came out. The latter is more likely as I cannot get XWindows to work on either machine. Since these are designated as servers this isn't a major problem. It would be useful to have a copy of the changes to the installer and XFree86 between Roswell and Enigma.
The installer changes between Roswell and Enigma were mostly bugfixes, so there was no major code changes. I don't know about X...I suggest filing a bug against the X component and maybe mharris can tell you more than I can. Having said that, I'm stumped as to why the graphical installer won't work on your machine. Can you try booting the installer with 'nofb'? This should avoid framebuffer mode...perhaps that is causing the problem?
I think you've lost your place. I've already tried nofb, and even tried it again with the latest boot disk image dated January 17th 2002. I have found a solution, but it's not ideal. I've brought in the Mach 64 card I had in my Escom machine at home (circa 1995) which is also 1MB, upgradeable to 2MB. I've put a SCSI CD onto the Adaptec card, and the machine boots the CD into graphical mode fine. Reverting back to the onboard card doesn't work. The inbuilt non-working card has P/N 113-25404-01, model 210888GX00 and 4x256K expansion slots. The card that works has P/N 113-32103-103, model 215CT222000 and 2X512K expansion slots. Because this machine only has two PCI slots, I don't want to use a different graphics card, since I want to use one NIC and one extra SCSI card. What now?
I don't know why the onboard video card doesn't work with X. This sounds now like it is more of an X Windows problem than an installer problem, so I'm changing the component of the bug report to X Windows. Mike, do you know of any problems with these older ATI mach64's?
>Now here comes the rub. RedHat 7.1 and 7.2 won't install graphically. Redhat >7.1.94 (ie Roswell) does! I've played with the BIOS settings for the on-board >VGA. IMHO, that shows that this is not an XFree86 problem, as nothing significant changed in XFree86 that would affect Mach64 cards in that timeframe. I have installed every release including all of our betas as they came out, on my server, which has onboard Mach64 with the GUI installer and not seen any such problems. I'm closing the bug as there is no way for me to debug a problem like this that I cannot reproduce, which isn't necessarily an XFree86 bug anyway. If anyone at all, including the bug reporter can reproduce this, and pinpoint it specifically to XFree86, and provide adequate details on reproducing, then perhaps the problem can be looked into further. There are just too many variables, and too few details however to be able to do anything. and
OK, I solved this now (comes of being an RHCE I guess...) In many cases anaconda cannot properly detect a video card. (I've even seen cases where Xconfigurator detects a video card incorrectly even when anaconda gets it right. eg my desktop machine has an Nvidia TNT card which Xconfigurator detects as a Mach 64 card, but I digress...) What I do is install this in text mode, and skip the X configuration. Then I install the XFree86-compat-modules and XFree86-SVGA packages. Then I run Xconfigurator to set the display to 800x600 with 8 bit colour. That works, although I am getting less colour depth than is possible with 1MB. I can't remember the syntax of the command right now, but I'll put it here later. This is a useful trick to get X-windows up on any card that gives problems at install time, eg a card that anaconda cannot detect during a kickstart install which then bails out of the install.