Please Help - Sabayon will not install

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
1

System - AMD Athlon 5350 quad-core APU, ASRock AM1H-ITX, 1x4GB 1600 CL9 AMD RAM, Adata SP600 128GB SSD, Silverstone ML05 HTPC case, Cooler Master NA90 90w universal PSU (notebook powerbrick).

 

Issue - I created a bootable USB stick using UNetbootin for Sabayon 14.06 using the Sabayon KDE AMD64 ISO. I made the USB the primary boot device in the UEFI. I start the PC and it loads the Sabayon menu (to run the KDE desktop, Install, etc...). It doesn't matter what I select - it shows the Sabayon loading splash screen then goes to black screen with the following:

 

This is sabayon.unknown_domain (Linux x86_64 3.14.0-sabayon)

Login:

 

After doing some research I tried typing in "root" and hit enter. It the brings up the command prompt, but before I can do anything, after a few seconds the screen goes blank again and only shows "_" in the top left corner. Some times the PC reboots and returns to the pre-installation menu from the boot drive. 

I've been researching this for hours and cannot figure out whats going on or why I can't get this to work. This is a brand new PC I just assembled today. It will be used for HTPC and Steam In-home game streaming mainly. 

This is driving me crazy because I installed this exact Sabayon ISO on a virtual machine in virtualbox without any issues. 

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

2

In the GRUB boot menu, select to run in safe mode, then install. Your X session isn't starting, but your system is running, so alternatively to running live in safe mode, you could just login as live user or root no problem then startx and if it refuses, run dmesg to see what happened, then dracut a proper initramfs with the drivers you don't want rd.blacklisted and probably nomodeset.

Thing with Sabayon is that it loads the proprietary drivers by default, but the live system isn't configured to rd.blacklist the KMS drivers, and that leads to problems on certain systems. If you start it up in safe mode, it only loads KMS drivers, and everything works just fine. You can install from the live session with proprietary drivers no problem, because in the install it will rd.blacklist the drivers you don't want. That's the easy way.

3

THANK YOU!!! Safe mode did the trick! :) Installed no problem and is running.

Unfortunately I don't really understand anything else you were talking about. I've been trying to learn as much as I can, but I find I just get lost very quickly. 

I'm still having some issues that I can't seem to figure out/solve no matter how much searching I do. Some of the wiki steps are really confusing to follow because I don't know if I'm supposed to be entering certain commands in terminal or what. To me it's not very clear on what specifically I'm supposed to "do".

One of the problems I'm trying to sort out is flash player plugin for Chromium. Apparently you can use something called pepperflash plugin but I can't find any clear instructions on how to install this with Sabayon.

The second thing is the GPU drivers. When I fire up steam big-picture mode, I can tell it's not working right because it's very choppy - as if it's running in software render mode. I ran this command:

# lspci | grep -i VGA

And it correctly detected the iGPU (Kabini Radeon HD8400 / R3 series), but I don't know where to go from there as I can't seem to find a clear method of how to check what drivers are installed, how to install different drivers (if desired) and or tweak the settings for better performance. However, when I open Info Center - graphical information and expand OpenGL, it shows the following under direct rendering:

3D accelerator = unknown

Then under driver it shows the following:

Vendor = VMware, inc.

Renderer = Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 3.3, 128 bits)

OpenGL/ES version = 2.1 Mesa 10.1.4

Kernel module = unknown

Everything else seems to be in order, as far as I can tell.

 

The third major issue is network detection. I have it connected to my home network router via Ethernet cable and the internet works just fine but my main windows PC cannot see it connected to the network. I suspect this is why even though I have In-home streaming enabled in Sabayon (albeit with a line through that option - can't disable it either) all of my games are "greyed out" and cannot be streamed. I've tried playing around a bit with some of the network settings but nothing seems to make any difference.

Netflix doesn't work either but that's a minor issue at this point - although it will be one of the main uses for this device so hopefully I can figure out how to get that working as well.

Again any assistance with any of this would be greatly appreciated. I hope you don't think I'm asking to be spoon-fed as personally I've always strived to find solutions on my own (after all, that's how we learn) but this is just still far beyond my knowledge. One can only spend so many hours working on a solution for a single problem while making zero progress... :(

4

Chromium has no flash player plug-in, it uses it's own version. It sucks. If you need flash player (which you probably don't, there is a benefit in not being able to use the DRM-laden flash player! In linux, we use other tools that offer more benefits and leverage the fact that linux knows no DRM...), install Firefox.

To know which drivers you're running, type "glxinfo" in terminal. It will give you a lot of feedback, just scroll up to the top and you'll see the driver identifiers mentioned there.

5

Ok, I ran "glxinfo" but I will have to check it again before I can determine the state of the drivers. It did show "direct rendering: yes" but that doesn't necessarily mean its using hardware rendering. I'm not at home right now so I'll have to check the OpenGL rendering string to confirm. If it indicates that it is using hardware rendering, what could be causing the poor performance in Steam big-picture/SteamOS? This APU should have no problem handling the SteamOS menu. In the BIOS I have 1GB ram allocated to be shared for use with the iGPU.

 

Was hoping to use chromium as I can simply log in just as I do with chrome. However if it's not optimal for Linux and firefox works better, then that's fine. I installed firefox but it still will not allow playback with netflix. Instead I keep getting redirected to the system requirements page when I try to watch something. Will have to do some more research on this issue...

Do you have any insight or tips on how to determine why I can't see this PC on the network?

 

Thanks again. You've been very helpful.

 

6

For Netflix, you need to install Pipelight. It's just been updated, it should work just fine.

What do you mean that you can't see the PC on the network? On what network, and see where? With some more info I might be able to help. It's probably just a firewalld security thingy that's easy to solve.

7

Was just reading about Pipelight - will give that a try. Thanks. 

 

For the network issue: I have 3 PC's. Main gaming rig running windows, a laptop also running windows and this new HTPC running Sabayon. The two windows PCs can see each other on the network no problem and In-home streaming works fine on the laptop with the gaming rig as host. However none of my windows PCs can see the Linux machine on the network. 

I tried playing around with some of the firewall settings but nothing seems to make a difference (make it visible to my windows PCs on the network).

 

As for the GPU drivers, I'm starting to understand a little more about this and progressing on getting more familiar with working in the terminal for the time being.