Hi All, i’m new to the forum, hope i’m not posting this in the wrong section.
I’m trying to install Tumbleweed Legacy i686 on an old IBM SurePOS just to play backround music in my workshop.
The machine is based on Intel 915 Chipset and it’s equipped with a P4 HT 3.2GHz, 2Gigs ddr2 ram, 250GB hdd. GPU is integrated in the chipset and i believe that bios assigns only 8 mb of memory to it reading “2gb ram +8M shared” in the system post.
The system was running Bodhi Linux without any issue but i wanted to try Tumbleweed .
I manage to go through the entire installation process but when the machine restarts, it posts regularly till the Welcome to GRUB string, then all i have is a black screen and no disk activity. If i press enter, the disk loads something but it suddenly stops and it won’t go any further.
Was tinking about a compatibility issue between the system and GRUB2 due to lack of graphics memory and was wondering if there is a way to use GRUB Legacy instead of GRUB2 as bootloader or even not use any since the system will have only Tumbleweed installed.
During installation i changed the disk partition table to MBR from the default GPT scheme cuz in GPT the system halts even sooner than grub starts to load, like the machine doesn’t know what to do past the initial post screen.
If you hit ESC as soon as you’ve made your Grub selection, do text messages appear? Any clues to where stoppage occurs? A login prompt eventually?
If at Grub you hit E and append nomodeset to the end of the linu line before proceeding, do you get more progress? What if you add also or instead a 3?
You should be able to boot rescue or installation media in rescue/text mode, then capture to share here output from lsblk -f and parted -l or fdisk -l to give us something to work with.
If you have the BIOS graphics memory set to 8 instead of 1, video memory should not be a limiting issue up to 1920x1200 at least.
Linux kernels IME don’t care what loads them. My i915 with 2.8GHz HT P4 and 2G plain DDR has no problem booting or running TW. It’s actually booting from the Grub Legacy installed with 13.1, so doesn’t need TW’s Grub installed. It’s a very old installation having lived through countless zypper dups, probably with Grub Legacy still installed, just not used.
Hi mrmazda, i can’t get to grub selection. The last readable thing on screen is “welcome to grub” then the screen become black. I tried hitting esc as soon as then welcome to grub line appears but nothing happens. While in black screen if i press E nothing happens, hitting enter i can see little drive activity but nothing else.
I tried adding Quiet splash nomodeset to linux line during setup, installing with no acpi but nothing changes.
I installed tw on a i915 based laptop with a centrino 1.83GHz and had none of this issues.
I managed to get tw boot only once loading the installed kernel from the installation media launch options.
Is there a way to swap the tw grub2 with a grub legacy version? I would boot a live but when i tried to download a live iso i found out only 64 bit ones were available, i need i686 ones. I’m not a linux expert so many of my questions may seems stupid. Thank you.
My tw install media doesn’t have a live mode to launch.
So i think i need a live version ISO file to flash on a media.
For what i can see, only 64bit live isos are available from the alternative download section. Dunno, Am i missing something?
So i managed to launch from usb media the kernel installed on the internal hdd and it booted fine. i ran your bootinfoscript and pasted online, this is the link openSUSE Paste
Thank you
The bootinfo file reports the installed Grub is v2.00. If that’s technically correct, then TW’s Grub v2.12 is not installed in the MBR. Booted to installed system via USB you should be able to update MBR with v2.12 using bootloader module of YaST.
It looks pretty good. I do not see anything unexpected. “Welcome to GRUB” is displayed by GRUB kernel when it gets loaded. Next step is to read and execute grub.cfg. Which is probably where it hangs.
Well, the first thing to test is to rename /boot/grub2/grub.cfg. Do you end up in GRUB CLI?
I’m embarassed for my lack of knowlege, do u mean rename the grub.cfg file to let the system create a new one? What do you mean by GRUB CLI? grub command line? grub client? T_T
In general, I would recommend not using btrfs on such an old system. I would recommend a separate boot partition (512Mb, exFat) and ext4 for the system/home. This will most likely not solve your problems.
I had similar, but not identical problems in the past:
Reinstalled TW with ur partitions advices and edited the linux line from yast, not from gub cuz i’m unable to get past the “welcome to grub” string, no boot menu for me. I have to manually boot the installed TW using the" Boot Linux System" option on the installation media menu.
removed splash=silent and quiet from linux line and added tsc=unstable at the end of the line .
I don’t know if position matters, maybe should i write that at the beginning of the linux line?
So i tried installing TW on another similar machine with i915 chipset and a Pentium D 950.
Same installation media same hard disk. The installation went fine, rebooted and TW started regularly. Mounting the hdd with the installed and booting TW on the IBM Surepos 545 ends in the same result. WELCOME TO GRUB and then a black screen that stays forever.
Thinking that the IBM it’s not compatible with Grub2. It’s a strange AIO system with peculiar integrated hardware.
Is there a way to install grub legacy as bootloader for TW?
Thank You in advance.
I doubt installing it in TW would be possible for anyone but an experienced programmer building it from source.
What certainly is possible is using Grub Legacy to boot current TW. Only my few UEFI PCs here are not being booted by Grub Legacy. This configuration is facilitated by a combination of multiboot, and one or more out-of-support distros per PC to host a Grub Legacy binary that can maintain Grub in a working state, plus a good working knowledge of Gnu/Linux systems generally, and more specifically, maintaining working Grub Legacy boot stanzas with a least practical amount of of admin effort.