Can't boot Live USB

richieheijmans

Hi all!

I can not boot the Live USB for Solus 4.1. Whenever it boots it gets stuck on some text about usb and brcmf. I can't do anything in this view, not even change to a different TTY. When I set the 'nomodeset' on the boot menu I can actually get into a different TTY and login there with root / root.

I've been poking around a bit there, although I'm unsure what exactly to look for, and all I found was that the GDM is active / running, but shows "GdmDisplay: Session never registered, failing" and "Child process -1345 was already dead.". I also found the Xorg log which shows things like "Unable to find a valid framebuffer device", "Screen 0 deleted because of no matching config section" and "Cannot run in framebuffer mode. please specify busIDs", followed by "Unable to run X server" and "Process -1345 was already dead".

I honestly have no idea where to go from here. Recent Ubuntu and Fedora releases both work perfectly out of the box on this machine. I'm running a Radeon 5700XT, Ryzen 5 2600 and some other stuff like a PCI WiFi card.

Richie

brent

Sounds corrupted. Make a new live usb, simply, follow the letter of the law: https://getsol.us/articles/installation/preparing-to-install/en/

richieheijmans

I have just followed the steps again twice, both the budgie and the gnome ISO. No indication of any problems while following the instructions (I write on Linux using dd). I even tried two different USB drives.

Same problems persist. The budgie ISO with normal boot goes to the _ (not blinking, seems like the correct display resolution) and nomodeset gives a blinking _ allowing me to switch TTY. I also don't hear the boot chime(?).

I also forgot to mention the error "open /dev/dri/card0: No such file or directory" while booting with nomodeset. /dev/dri is indeed empty. I've also disabled fast boot and secure boot, although that does not seem to make any difference. I'm using the UEFI boot option in the boot menu.

EDIT: As suggested on other topics I also tried to restart gdm / lightdm. Lightdm says 'Failed', probably because Xorg doesn't start(?).

EDIT 2: USB Drive works fine on my MacBook.

Walt

richieheijmans I have a black screen with mouse pointer in both Budgie and Plasma live USBs-- Do you have an Nvidia graphics card?

richieheijmans

Walt no I have AMD.

salexandarz

did you formated your usb as fat32?

Justin

salexandarz The USB doesn't need to be formatted, when you write the ISO directly it will create it's own filesystem.

Axios

do a lspci command see if you get a output like this to see at the bottom if its loading the amdgpu also make sure your motherboard bios is up to date.
84:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Device 731f (rev c1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Subsystem: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Device 0b36
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 100, NUMA node 1
Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
Memory at f0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=2M]
I/O ports at f000
Memory at fbc00000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512K]
Expansion ROM at fbc80000 [disabled] [size=128K]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: amdgpu
Kernel modules: amdgpu

Walt

The thing is, if the USB stick was formatted wrong, it wouldn't boot at all- it would just go back out to the motherboard BIOS screen. It goes all the way to what should be the desktop, only the desktop is black (on both monitors) and the mouse cursor is a typical Linux one and can traverse between the monitors. My guess is that it is installing the Newwst Nvidia driver (448.85 I think) which still has lots of issues that I've run into myself. Version 440 is the most recent confirmed stable. In other linux distros the Nouveau driver works fine. I might try to get it to load that driver while still on the select os screen.

Justin

Walt The live ISO doesn't contain the NVIDIA proprietary driver at all. It only uses nouveau for NVIDIA cards until you install and then you can optionally install the proprietary driver.

rotorrad

Hi folks, so is there something being done about live USB disk not working? I've spent 2 days trying, formating USB pen drive on windows, mac. No luck. I can install any other distro no problem. EFI disk shows and gets on with the installation. I was really looking forward to use this particular distro.

Junglist

rotorrad Have you tried the dd (command line / terminal) method on mac?

I always use dd method (on Linux), it's 100% reliable, just follow the instructions, and make sure you select the correct disk.

WetGeek

Junglist I always use dd method (on Linux), it's 100% reliable

Isn't Etcher just a GUI wrapper for DD?

DataDrake

WetGeek No, etcher uses a similar process of writing, but not dd itself.

jcrabapple

I'm having similar issues. I've tried a few different USB flash drives, I've redownloaded the ISO a few times, and I've used several apps to write the image to the drive including Gnome MultiWriter, Etcher, and dd. Secure boot is disabled in my BIOS. Image attached.

adurante

jcrabapple Stupid suggestion and anecdotal, have you tried a different USB port on the machine itself? I had this error once before and as ridiculous as it sounds it went away when I tried a different usb port.

Harvey

jcrabapple
On reddit you've stated your laptop is a Lenovo IdeaPad 3 17ARE05.

All of those appear to have AMD Ryzen 4000U series CPUs. Which did not exist when the current ISO was released (January 2020). So I would put money on the kernel the current ISO ships with not supporting your hardware maybe some mesalib issue too. The ISO will be updated when these tasks are finished https://dev.getsol.us/T8629

Solus stable repository currently has 5.6.18. The 5.6.19 kernel is likely the last in the 5.6 series meaning 5.7.x would be around the corner. Hopefully that will ship with 4.2.

Quick google search shows https://forum.manjaro.org/t/configuring-amd-ryzen-4500u-laptop/144712/6 it is unclear if he is including 5.6.x series as kernels that won't boot or just kernels that don't support his hardware properly.

However 5.8 is currently a release candidate and one user on their forums (later in the thread) is still experiencing issues with freezes so 🤷‍♂️

jcrabapple

adurante Hey thanks for the reply! I've tried all 3 USB ports on the laptop.

jcrabapple

Harvey Thanks for the reply! My suspicion is that it's the kernel (5.4 in the ISO I believe) but there must be something missing from the Solus 5.4 kernel that is in other distros' kernels because I can boot Ubuntu which is on 5.4 OOB. I would really love to run Solus on this laptop but I guess I will just have to be patient for the next release.

Harvey

jcrabapple
Makes sense come to think of it. 5.4 series is an LTS kernel so it will get fixes and some hardware support added for years to come. They likely have a kernel in the 5.4 series newer than the 5.4.12 that shipped with Solus 4.1 ISO.

If you're curious you can boot off the ISO of a distro that works, check which kernel is being used by running uname -r

But yeah sounds like you'll have to wait till 4.2 only alternative is putting the sdd in another system, installing Solus, update, shutdown, move ssd back... kinda a PITA.