MythBuntu install

[UKenGB]

I'm trying to set up the backend on an old PC I still have, with NO OS on it whatsoever. I've downloaded the MythBuntu ISO and burned to a DVD, the trouble is, the PC won't boot from it. It will however boot from a CD which leads me to conclude that it is too old to boot from DVD and even though I can select USB-HDD as a boot option, it won't boot from the USB stick installer of Windows10 that I have available to try. But, that's on an 8Gb stick which may be too much for that old BIOS.

Has anyone come across these limitations in the Award BIOS of some years ago?

So:-

Can I somehow put the MythBuntu install onto a couple of CDs?

Is the old BIOS likely to only work with a FAT16 formatted USB-HDD (with 2 Gb max. size)?

How can I create a bootable USB stick? I can copy/burn the ISO file to a USB stick, but what format will that be? Will it end up as CDFS as if it's an optical disk? In which case, how best to create a USB stick that will actually boot and enable me to install MythBuntu from it?

Any other suggestions as to how to get past this problem?

[wesnewell]

IIRC , I just used dd to copy the iso file to my usb stick. Looking at it now, it shows an iso 9660 file system on it. I used a 4G stick, but a 2G is big enough. You need to set the bios up to boot from usb.

[MoebusNet]

Another possibility is to use an external DVD drive to boot from the DVD via USB if you just can't get flash drives to work. If you don't have one, you can probably borrow one long enough to install the OS. BTW, small flash drives (2-4G) are cheap enough now that you can afford to pick one up on the off chance that it will work where the 8G drive won't.

[UKenGB]

I've got a couple of 2 Gb USB flash drives on their way. We'll see how they work, but in the meantime, I'm going to try and update the BIOS using FreeDOS on a CDROM emulating a floppy. Who knows, if that is successful, it may boot from DVD and/or larger USB media.

Fingers crossed.

[UKenGB]

Having updated the BIOS on the PC, it was finally able to boot from the DVD I made from the MythBuntu 14.04 ISO, so far so good.

I followed the install procedure, answering the questions where required and after a while it said installation was successful and finished. As instructed I removed the DVD, pressed Enter and it rebooted, but after a quick flash of something on the screen, er, nothing. The disc light flashes sporadically, but it's not trying to load anything and the screen is just blank, but there is a signal as the monitor is still active and not going to sleep.

I booted from a DOS CD and it cannot access C:/, but not surprising I guess as it won't understand the filesystem. So back to trying to boot from the HD, but it won't have it. The BIOS is set to use HDD-0 as third boot device and when it had Windows on it, this would boot. The MB installer even saw that the HD had Windows and asked if I wanted to replace it all, to which I said yes.

Does a MB backend actually produce no video output whatsoever? I realise it's generally meant to run headless, but I assumed there must be some display to allow at least the initial configuration.

So what gives? Anyone any suggestions? Under what circumstances will MB simply not boot like this?

[wesnewell]

Sounds like a video driver problem. Standard tty is tty7. Hit Ctrl-Alt F1 for a tty1 login screen. F2 for tty2, etc. If you get a login screen, the system is probably running ok and you'll need to fix video problem. You may be using a wrong driver.Hitting Ctrl-Alt F7 should take you back to the standard tty. If you selected a proprietary driver during install instead of the default, that is likely the cause.

[UKenGB]

It's using an elderly ATi Radeon card and currently hooked up via DVI. Video has worked for Windows, DOS and the MythBuntu install seemed to use it ok. Why the final installation of MB then not be able to use it? I selected nothing special during the install. Wasn't even asked I don't think.

Ctrl-Alt F? does nothing. Although the monitor obviously thinks there's a video signal and doesn't go to sleep, it is in fact just a black screen.

If I listen to the HD while it's starting, I can hear it whirring away as it boots and the light flashes, but nothing on the screen.

[UKenGB]

It's definitely a video problem. I can ssh into it and it seems to be running ok.

I guess the big question now is how to sort the video. Would it not have suitable drivers? I know the cards a few years old, but it must be able to run some basic video output.

[UKenGB]

lspci shows this:-

VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV200 [Radeon 7500/7500 LE] [1002:5157] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])

So it seems to have picked up the correct card, but I'm still no nearer figuring why no video output.

[UKenGB]

It doesn't seem to be connected since the system obviously is booting, but the installer specified the HD as SCSI, yet there is NO SCSI device involved. There used to be a SCSI card in this PC, but I removed it prior to installing MythBuntu and everything is now on the m/board's 2 x IDE channels. I can also see processes running with scsi in their name. Anyone explain why?

Is it possible it took some information from the original Windows installation on this HD? That did involve SCSI as I was using the SCSI card. I expected the MB install would totally wipe the disk first. Come to think of it, the installer did say everything on the disk would be lost. So why still the reference to SCSI?

[UKenGB]

Well lshw -c video starts with:-

*-display UNCLAIMED

so no driver has loaded for this card - hence no output I guess.

dmesg | egrep 'drm|radeon' ->

[ 25.622611] [drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810
[ 26.591861] [drm] radeon kernel modesetting enabled.
[ 26.653361] [drm] initializing kernel modesetting (RV200 0x1002:0x5157 0x1002:0x013A).
[ 26.653420] [drm] register mmio base: 0xEF000000
[ 26.653425] [drm] register mmio size: 65536
[ 26.653975] radeon 0000:01:00.0: putting AGP V2 device into 4x mode
[ 26.653985] radeon 0000:01:00.0: GTT: 64M 0x00000000 - 0x03FFFFFF
[ 26.654000] radeon 0000:01:00.0: limiting VRAM to PCI aperture size
[ 26.654008] radeon 0000:01:00.0: VRAM: 0M 0x0000000000000000 - 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF (0M used)
[ 26.654083] [drm] Detected VRAM RAM=0M, BAR=0M
[ 26.654089] [drm] RAM width 128bits DDR
[ 26.662225] radeon 0000:01:00.0: Fatal error during GPU init
[ 26.662242] [drm] radeon: finishing device.
[ 26.662257] [drm] radeon: cp finalized
[ 26.662468] [drm] radeon: ttm finalized
[ 26.669999] radeon: probe of 0000:01:00.0 failed with error -12

which rather looks like there was a problem when trying to load the driver, hence the card remains 'UNCLAIMED'.

Anyone suggest what this problem is? The card does work, until the system has booted then looks like it tries to start X. Unfortunately it means no output at all so I cannot even switch to a terminal. I can however ssh to it from another machine, but on the MythBuntu machine, there is NO video output whatsoever. The failure to load the driver has killed it completely.

Er, help!

[wesnewell]

Towards the end of the mythbuntu install, there's a page where it ask for a display driver, Did you select one or use the default one? May be easier just to reinstall and make sure you select a generic driver on that page. Or, since you can ssh into the system, find X config files and change the driver. Start in /etc/X11. But if you don't know what's your doing, you'll get lost fast.

[UKenGB]

I'm going to re-install anyway and take more notice of what it's doing. I've been looking through the X config stuff, but as you say, easy to get lost, not helped by the fact that most of the documentation seems to be wrong, claiming locations for configuration files that simply doesn't exist.

Doesn't X config just affect screens displaying in X. Surely, shouldn't terminal screens still work even if the X config is screwed up? Since the screen is totally black, it looks more like total driver failure and no output whatsoever.

However, it looks to me like the default open-source driver 'radeon' was chosen and tries to run, as indicated by dmesg output above. Hmm, so how does it display the installer? How come that worked?

[wesnewell]

You can all you want to know here. But be warned, it's not something you'll figure out in a hurry.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=c ... onf+ubuntu

[UKenGB]

I realised that I was using the DVI output of the Radeon to the monitor and I believe there have been issues with DVI. So I switched to VGA and re-installed (also with different Ethernet card, but can't see how that would make a difference). On reboot after installer finished, it looked like no video again so I restarted into 'recovery' and told it to check the packages (or some such wording) and it then spent an AGE downloading, updating and re-configuring a LOAD of stuff. When it finally finished, I restarted again and initially thought no better, then eventually I saw a mouse cursor and finally the desktop and I could switch to other terminal sessions. From where I was able to ascertain with lshw that the card now DOES have the Radeon driver assigned.

So that was certainly the problem, somehow the Radeon driver was simply not being used. No driver, no video. But why? Is it the fact I'm now using the VGA not DVI connection? Was it the package updates that fixed it or would it in fact have started had I left it longer before using recovery. This was however NOT the case previously as I had left it for hours and still nothing.

So, it is running and I now have to figure everything else out. First of which is apparent errors with MySQL. I saw a possible problem when updating packages but looking at the relevant section in the GUI tells me nothing. MythTV setup does however say there's a problem and I guess due to this, provides no setup options at all.

Any suggestions how to bring MySQL to a usable state? I'd prefer to avoid simply re-installing the package as I suspect that would lose any special config already done for MythTV. Anyone suggest the best course of action here?