Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 89722
Add 'nofb' to syslinux help screen
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:53:19 EDT
Description of problem: When trying to boot into a text or rescue modes on an Acer 230 Travelmate laptop (Intel i845 video) everything is fine until "running /sbin/loader" (or something pretty close) shows up on a screen. At this moment screen goes into a funk state blinking all the time and making it hard to read. It appears that an image wraps-up over a top, cursor is loosing its position, text shows up in wrong places and it is a blinking gray on a black instead of white on black. Even typing "in blind" is not much help as most of results ends up below a screen edge. A graphic screen is also not that great (nasty distorted fonts and jagged lines all over the place) but somewhat usable unless one needs to visit a text console which is then mostly covered by a blue-gray blob and really has nothing to offer. No amount of specifying vga modes and/or screen resolutions seems to help. All of that is just ignored the moment we are hitting '/sbin/loader', even if a parameter had some effect on a screen look up to this moment, and things go haywire. OTOH when booting a CD from RH 7.3 distribution nothing of that sort happens. Text consoles remain "normal" and usable. I have to give 'nopcmcia' to boot or otherwise the whole process is stuck on PCMCIA cards detection but one past that everything is fine.
Please try adding 'nofb' to the boot command line.
> Please try adding 'nofb' to the boot command line. Does not seem to be doing anything useful. OTOH on this laptop there is a "function key" which switches between an external monitor, or a built-in display or both. In one of these positions in a cycle (I think that this is "both" but I did not have an external display attached) a screen becomes readable as a much smaller rectangle in a center probably in 800x600 mode. Even a graphic installation display starts looking ok although substantially reduced in size.
Contrary to what I said before 'nofb' seems to help in an essential way. Either I mistyped something previously or the fact, I discovered in the meantime, that some weirdly named option in BIOS has a direct bearing on how much of a graphic memory is available is also not without significance here. OTOH a "small picture" method described above still looks the best. :-) No strangely stretched pixels and lines doubled in unexpected places. Still it would be really nice if 'nofb' while booting/installing would be mentioned somewhere on help screens. Currently it is not there.
I'll see if we can fit it in.
Done.
confirmed. closing.