Soas-2-beta ISO hangs and then prompts to create user

[bogstad]

Booting the Soas-2-beta ISO under VirtualBox 3.0.4 hangs for a LONG time and then appears to dump one into
the the standard (fedora?) install system. Note: This is booting from the ISO not a virtual appliance.

[bogstad (bogstad)]

Tried again with the second release of the beta (checked via sha1sum). Half the problem is gone. The plymouth
ticker on the bottom of the screen eventually stops changing (all white) and then it sits there for a long time (>5 minutes). Eventually though it continues and I get the normal sugar setup screen to specify username and colors.

[Sebastian Dziallas (sdziallas)]

Thanks for testing again (and sorry for the confusion with the wrong image). Well, it should be a bit quicker, but should also only happen at the first time you boot, since it's when all the activities get extracted into the /home directory. However, I agree, that it could take quite some time right now. We are investigating it (and had a preliminary fix in GIT, which was not stable enough to make it into the beta, though).

[bogstad (bogstad)]

Please note this was booting directly from the ISO (image), not a USB stick. Since the ISO/CD isn't writable, the setup delay will happen every time it is used. Direct usage as an ISO may not be considered significant for SoaS, but I just wanted to clarify that it won't be a one time thing in this usage case. I'll try it out on real hardware when I get a chance and see if VirtualBox is making this case worse.

[Sebastian Dziallas (sdziallas)]

Oh yeah, you are obviously right. Sorry for the confusion. I'll mark this as "in progress" as we try to fix it in GIT.

[Thomas C Gilliard (satellit-)]

when iso is burned to cd. Plymouth screen only appears on some PC's (XO animation) If it appears then you will get through to a sugar name and color logon. If instead, you get the horizontal bar of Fedora, You will never get to a logon,

This second result occurs everytime I try to use either the CD or .iso in VMworkstation ( SCSI or IDE disk emulation.) It never (tried for 2 hrs) gets to logon.

What causes the bimodal behavior with or without Plymouth?

[bogstad (bogstad)]

I tried burning a CD as well and the screen blanks after the initial "Automatic boot in 1 second" message and then
nothing is ever displayed again. The same machine boots a Soas-strawberry CD with no problems.

[Sebastian Dziallas (sdziallas)]

This is caused by the KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) feature which has been introduced with F10 and since then been enabled on more and more hardware. Here's the old feature page: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/KernelModesetting

And here are some more background information: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/KMS_in_Fedora_11
You can disable it manually in the kernel arguments, using the parameters here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F12_bugs#Hardware-related_issues

So if you hardware is considered to support KMS, you'll get the shiny boot screen. If it isn't, you'll get the text bar.

Regarding the boot helper, I uploaded a new one to fit the kernel of the v2 beta release. You can grab it from here: http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-2-boot.iso

[bogstad (bogstad)]

And what does it mean, if I get NOTHING on the screen ever again? The CD spins for a while and then stops and nothing is displayed. Totally black screen. BTW, I downloaded the F12 Alpha ISO and tried it out with the same results. The machine in question has an old Nvidia card, so I tried nouveau.modeset=0 on the boot line as mentioned in the release notes. This managed to get me the moving lines on the bottom of the screen display, but eventually the screen went blank and nothing ever is displayed again.

I suppose the good news is that this problem appears to come upstream from F12 and not SoaS related changes.
I'll eventually try to figure out how to submit the bug the Fedora. For now, I can't try out the SoaS betas on real hardware.

[Thomas C Gilliard (satellit-)]

I see this in VMware everytime.
The CD seems to have 2 modes.
 *1) Plymouth animations to sugar name
 *2) Fedora bars and then nothing ( I have waited an hour and it never goes to sugar name.)

 HP-Pavillion Vista laptop sees 1.
 Both EeePC 900 and EeePC1000HE see 2.
What is the difference?

[bogstad (bogstad)]

My guess is that #1 indicates that kernel mode setting (KMS) is being used and works on your hardware.
#2 indicates that KMS isn't being used, but when the system eventually tries to start X, it will fail to do so.

My test box exhibits a third behavior.

*3) totally blank screen. I suspect this is caused by an attempt to use KMS which fails.

When I followed the instructions at

 http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F12_bugs#Hardware-related_issues

and set nouveau.modeset=0, I converted my machine from #3 to #2.

The test machine is an older IBM P4 based NetVista desktop which has an older Nvidia graphics card.

[Sebastian Dziallas (sdziallas)]

Okay. So I think we're talking about two issues at the same place here:

(1) is about the fact that extracting the activities takes quite a big amount of time.
(2) is about booting SoaS, which fails if KMS gets disabled.

We're working on (1) in GIT, while I'm not sure what may be causing (2). The latter one is probably an upstream issue in Fedora, but we'll need to sort this out first. Does pressing ESC change anything? And could you please submit and link your hardware profile using smolt (as explained here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Hardware#Next_Steps), so that we can identify the issues better?

Thanks!
--Sebastian

[Sebastian Dziallas (sdziallas)]

A fix for (1) has been committed in GIT and will be likely pushed out in the next snapshot. Note that the downside is however an highly increased image size. (2) will need to be investigated.

[Sebastian Dziallas (sdziallas)]

Should be fixed in the new snapshot!