[SOLVED] video problems booting antiX 17.2 via PlopKexec

Post Reply
Message
Author
PPC
Posts: 362
Joined: Tue Sep 11, 2018 8:22 am

[SOLVED] video problems booting antiX 17.2 via PlopKexec

#1 Post by PPC »

hi. Sorry for the lack of details (no INXI), I'm using a different computer now...

Here's my problem: I have my home pc with a nvidea card, with antiX 16.2 and I would like to upgrade to 17.2 full 64 bits. It does not boot via USB and I have no way of burning a DVD (I have a DVD player/CD-rom recorder only).
I looked around for options and found out about Plop (at https://www.plop.at). People on youtube seemed to be able to use it to boot to USB on pc's that did not have that boot option on the BIOS.
No luck, it, for some reason, freezes up when I select the option to boot to usb. The same ingenious guy that came up with Plop also did PlopKexec. I burned the iso of his linux (a 32bits version that presented the option to boot to a linux kernel via the menu).

I boot into plopkexec. it displays several options that looked like:

[USB device name]: antiX 17.2...
[USB device name]: costume 9 Outober ...
[USB device name]: safe video mode ...

[USB device name]: antiX 17.2...
[USB device name]: costume 9 Outober ...
[USB device name]: safe video mode ...

I have no option to enter any boot parameters as far as I can see...
It seems to repeat these options twice.

I clicked on all options and I always end up in a "working" 1024*768 screen resolution, but with several problems: the desktop image seems to be in something like 16 colors and if I open any window most of it's contents have so many graphical glitches that they are almost impossible to read. The window title bar has horizontal thin colored scratches (it seems like a bad graphics card I've seen long ago). Text inside Dillo's window seems to display fine...
Xrandr shows only this one screen resolutions and does not name the video output device (the installed antiX 16.2 calls it VGA-1). I logged into my installed antiX, copied the working Xrandr parameters and tried in the live USB. no luck, the video device was not found, the video resolution was no available...
Choosing "safe video mode" presented me with a cli only (I wonder if it's safe to try installing from the terminal or the video glitches will carry over to the hd instalation?)

So, will I have to ask a friend burn me a antiX 17.2 Dvd or do you have any idea how to solve this?

Thanks in advance for any insight about this situation

P.
Last edited by PPC on Mon Oct 15, 2018 5:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
fehlix
Developer
Posts: 10308
Joined: Wed Apr 11, 2018 5:09 pm

Re: video problems booting antiX 17.2 via PlopKexec

#2 Post by fehlix »

PPC wrote: Fri Oct 12, 2018 5:33 am I boot into plopkexec. it displays several options that looked like:
You shall have an Edit mode within plopkexec,
I think, press E to edit: and add to or change the APPEND line
something like this example:
vga=791 quiet splash=v disable=lx video=1600x900
Gigabyte Z77M-D3H, Intel Xeon E3-1240 V2 (Quad core), 32GB RAM,
GeForce GTX 770, Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB, Seagate Barracuda 4TB

PPC
Posts: 362
Joined: Tue Sep 11, 2018 8:22 am

Re: video problems booting antiX 17.2 via PlopKexec

#3 Post by PPC »

@ fehlix:
many thanks for the very fast reply! I'll try that as soon as possible and tell you if that worked!

P.

User avatar
fehlix
Developer
Posts: 10308
Joined: Wed Apr 11, 2018 5:09 pm

Re: video problems booting antiX 17.2 via PlopKexec

#4 Post by fehlix »

PPC wrote: Fri Oct 12, 2018 5:33 am I looked around for options and found out about Plop (at https://www.plop.at). People on youtube seemed to be able to use it to boot to USB on pc's that did not have that boot option on the BIOS.
No luck, it, for some reason, freezes up when I select the option to boot to usb.
Note: Plop is very picky when it comes to boot from USB port. What I always do,
when it not works the first time is to plug-out all USB-devices. If you have an USB-keyboard, try to use PS/s adapter.
Plug-out USB-mouse. Now retry all USB-ports one after the other using USB-stick with plop.
It rearely failed this way.
Gigabyte Z77M-D3H, Intel Xeon E3-1240 V2 (Quad core), 32GB RAM,
GeForce GTX 770, Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB, Seagate Barracuda 4TB

User avatar
fehlix
Developer
Posts: 10308
Joined: Wed Apr 11, 2018 5:09 pm

Re: video problems booting antiX 17.2 via PlopKexec

#5 Post by fehlix »

Just checked within VirtualBox to boot from a LiveUSB with PlopKexec:
Works great. Within existing kernel line I changed screen resolution and added lang, kbd and timezone,
so the line looked like:

Code: Select all

quiet splash=v disable=lx video=1600x900  lang=de kbd=de  tz=Europe/Berlin
Within the existing Grub-menu I added a menu-entry in /boot/grub/custom.cfg like this:

Code: Select all

menuentry "Plop Kexec Boot Manager" {
    #set root=(hd0,1)
    search --no-floppy --set=root --file /boot/plop/plopkexec
    linux16 /boot/plop/plopkexec
}
After having copied plopkexec into a new folder /boot/plop.
Works great and also via USB3, where the original plop boot manager could only boot via USB2.
+++
EDIT: You can get further options within a textmenu (includung language and timezone) if you adding "menus" within PlopKexec after pressing E to Edit, so the linux boot paramter line look like this:

Code: Select all

quiet splash=v disable=lx menus
Gigabyte Z77M-D3H, Intel Xeon E3-1240 V2 (Quad core), 32GB RAM,
GeForce GTX 770, Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB, Seagate Barracuda 4TB

User avatar
rokytnji.1
Global Moderator
Posts: 706
Joined: Sun Apr 13, 2014 9:06 pm

Re: video problems booting antiX 17.2 via PlopKexec

#6 Post by rokytnji.1 »

Plus 1 on everything previous suggested.

Having used PLOP for years on usb 1.1. I am quite accustomed to watching my install process act like watching paint dry.

I have had to change usb drives, ports, md5sum PLOP iso, etc..........

I think or imagine I once got plop to boot from pmcia usb once even. Which was usb 2.0 , on AntiX I have experienced just a antix logo sometimes. Changing usb drives and ports and how I install plop to usb has fixed that.

User avatar
rokytnji.1
Global Moderator
Posts: 706
Joined: Sun Apr 13, 2014 9:06 pm

Re: video problems booting antiX 17.2 via PlopKexec

#7 Post by rokytnji.1 »

On the graphics issue. Newer xorg and kernels have dropped some nvidia support on older graphics chips.
I learned that on a old Emachine 3507.

If the open source nvidia driver is the cause of your trouble. I had to roll with the vesa driver myself to sort my scrambled screens out.

User avatar
rokytnji.1
Global Moderator
Posts: 706
Joined: Sun Apr 13, 2014 9:06 pm

Re: video problems booting antiX 17.2 via PlopKexec

#8 Post by rokytnji.1 »

Code: Select all

inxi -v8
Also. When you boot a live session again. Post the output results in terminal from this command to members can see more on your hardware specs.

PPC
Posts: 362
Joined: Tue Sep 11, 2018 8:22 am

Re: video problems booting antiX 17.2 via PlopKexec

#9 Post by PPC »

Thanks for all the replies (and sorry for the delay... I only had time to get a crack at my problem Sunday afternoon).
My video problem had nothing to do with plopkexec! Apparently was connected to antiX live USB saving video mode data with the "savestate" that comes activated out of the box (Dolphin told me that on another thread I started about antiX saving data without persistence). The live USB seemed to keep trying to use the video mode that worked on my netbook on my home pc... :frown:
I just had to boot using "nosavestate" and "vga=794" options. I don't know why the "nosavestate" did not work from me from the append command in the one time I tried it, I had to boot from the live boot USB menu for it to work...

And the way I got there made me think I finally grew my hard core Linux user beard :-).
It was nothing special, I just used some googling skills to find out if it was possible to boot to USB drive in my system using something else than plop and plopKexec. And yes! Probably most savvy users know this but I just found out-

How to boot to USB from GRUB!

Just in case someone else wants to boot a PC with a BIOS that does not allow to boot usb drives, there are some easy steps to follow:
1- start GRUB- either from a system installed to your hard drive or from a live cd/dvd. If you don't know what that is- the menu that comes up saying "antiX" with several boot options- that's a GRUB menu.
2- press the letter "c" (no need to press enter). A terminal comes up allowing you to enter commands (ence the "C" key, I guess)
3-type the command "ls". That displays all your drives and partitions, in Linux terminology (DriveNumber, PartitionNumber). It my system it takes almost 10 seconds to display the information... Don't despair...
Now you have the list of all the drives and partitions your pc detects, in a not very friendly way. Usually the first drive is the hard drive (something like [HD0,xx]) , so it's a good bet to start looking at the second drive, with the following command:
4-type the command "ls", space, and the drive and partition you want to look at, for example in my case, "(hd1,msdos1)". In this example the command looks like this:
ls (hd1,msdos1)

5-if the description of the drive and partition tell you that's your USB drive (for example: the size and name "antiX live bios...") then you have the right drive and partition. If not, repeat the last command with other partition and/or drive numbers, until you see the one that shows up is your USB drive. Write it down. If that's the correct one, you won't need to do steps 1-5 again to boot from this USB drive.
6- you have to type three more commands. Replace (hdx,x) with the drive and partition number of your USB drive and press Enter after each line.
set root=(hdx,x)
chainloader +1
boot
7-and instantly your USB boot menu shows up on screen!

Note1: just is case you are using a non English keyboard: The "=" sign is on the second to last key of the keyboard row that has the numbers... The "(" and ")" are in keys "9" and "0"... It took me a bit of trial and error to find that out...

Note2: any error you make trying this won't damage your system the worst that, as far as I know, can happen is getting a sintax error or not booting... if that happens just reboot your machine. This worked out for me, my BIOS was not able to boot from USB but it was able to detect the USB drive. It may not be so in other BIOS... If not, try Plop or plopKexec!

Thanks again for all the replies, I learned a lot, as always, from this forum!

PS: @fehlix - maybe adapting and adding this entry to your boot menu could be handy. it has the benefit of showing the graphical boot menu of the USB distro you are testing!


P.
Last edited by PPC on Mon Oct 15, 2018 10:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
fehlix
Developer
Posts: 10308
Joined: Wed Apr 11, 2018 5:09 pm

Re: video problems booting antiX 17.2 via PlopKexec

#10 Post by fehlix »

PPC wrote: Mon Oct 15, 2018 5:15 am
set root=(hdx,x)
chainloader +1
boot
7-and instantly your USB boot menu shows up on screen!
PS: @fehlix - maybe adapting and adding this entry to your boot menu could be handy. it has the benefit of showing the graphical boot menu of the USB distro you are testing!
Yes, this is an nice alternative, which works in some cases.
Unfortunately this only works for BIOS's which do identify the USB drive. Grub can only see what the BIOS is providing.
You can quickly check what drives GRUB could see by using within the grub-shell the command completion:
Press ls and space and "(" and TAB-key, whick quckly lists available drives for command-completion.
Sometimes the chainloader method works this way, rarely for usb-unfriendly BIOSs. And again BIOS is here the blocking factor. As grub will do the chainload-jumb to boot with help of the BIOS function calls, this is sometimes not working, even if you see the USB-drive.

A more robst methode would be to integrate Linux based USB-drive search, which do have it's one drive-search/access functions and do not rely on BIOS function calls, as Plopkexec is doing. So yes the chainloader method is good to add to the knowledgbase.
:puppy:
Gigabyte Z77M-D3H, Intel Xeon E3-1240 V2 (Quad core), 32GB RAM,
GeForce GTX 770, Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB, Seagate Barracuda 4TB

Post Reply

Return to “antiX”