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Today

Indiana: VESA if you need it

Over the past week, as we kept reassembling the distro constructor, image packaging, and slim install, we tested installs on a bunch of laptops. This manual operation let me rehearse how to get things working if the Preview LiveCD doesn't have a graphics driver that will work. So: here's the VESA workaround.

Boot text mode. One of the non-default lines in the GRUB menu should say "text"—pick that one.
Login as jack. User is "jack", password is "jack".
Generate a representative xorg.conf. Become root and have Xorg generate an initial configuration. The root password is "opensolaris". (Enjoy that `root`'s default shell is 'bash' for a bit.)
```
$ su
Password:
# /usr/X11/bin/Xorg -configure
...
```
This procedure should create /jack/xorg.conf.new.
Change the driver. As root, you'll continue by editing that xorg.conf.new file in vi(1). Search for the Device section, and modify the Driver line to
```
    Driver  "vesa"
```

Make it go. Stay root and hand-launch GNOME.

# /usr/X11/bin/xinit /usr/bin/dbus-launch gnome-session -- \
        /usr/X11/bin/Xorg -config /jack/xorg.conf.new :0

Launch the installer. Bring up a terminal, and invoke the installer, by typing install-lan &.

If your install fails, please file a bug report at defect.opensolaris.org. If it succeeds, but graphics doesn't work, you can follow the same steps, but you'll have to edit the GRUB entry. (Roughly, type 'e', add "-s" to the end of the line with kernel/unix, and log in with the new root password you set during install. I haven't tested this portion—let me know if it fails.)

Last night, I had to do this for my trusty VAIO T370P, but tonight it's fine:

Please let us know how it goes.

[ T: OpenSolaris Solaris indiana pkg ]

(2007-10-31 21:26:36.0) Permalink Comments [5]

Comments:

Just live booted the image on my Gateway MT3422 (Athlon X2, Nvidia), graphics works great. Thanks for the hint, the jack username and password worked fine since I couldn't remember the default root password for live install. I think I have the live boot root username in an email somewhere, we should make it more clear in the download page what that is. But congratulations,

Posted by Marc Hamilton on October 31, 2007 at 09:52 PM PDT #

Huzzah! Nice work. I'm sorry I couldn't be there tonight.

Posted by Dan Price on November 01, 2007 at 12:13 AM PDT #

I tend to try in-preview.iso on every PC not able to run away :-) - just worked fine with Xorg!

Tonight I tried it on xVM (aka Xen), and since there is no graphics available now, it got stuck at the text-screens.
To have Xvnc started instead of Xorg I filed a bug on http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=141

You would then connect with a vncviewer client from the local or a remote machine.

Therefore this would even help people running the OS on a completely unsupported graphics hardware or on a remote/headless machine.

Posted by Thomas Wagner on November 04, 2007 at 03:41 PM PST #

I ve tried Indiana on an YAKUMO lap. with athlon m1800 and 256 meg ram. "live" session was booting for about one hour. So after this time waiting i saw new gnome desktop but
this laptop was totaly slow.
Is it normal?!

I mean 256 megs of ram is´nt big thing but with open suse 10.3 "live" it works better.
Is it posibble to use fluxbox or windowmaker for
indiana?

Posted by Nedzad on November 07, 2007 at 01:03 PM PST #

@Thomas: Thanks for the bug report.

@Nedzad: I know the install/LiveCD team wants to work on the memory footprint in the future, but the current version is definitely going to be sluggish or even inoperable far below 512MB.

-- Stephen

Posted by Stephen on November 07, 2007 at 01:43 PM PST #