[Solved] MacBook Air 3,1 Video Issue

[DilbertLinux]

I just got a MacBook Air 3,1 to play with and I just tried to boot the 32-bit Porteus CD on it. Everything looks fine until the Desktop starts to load. It looks like the video driver is messed up. You get red,green, and yellow wavy lines on about 3/4 of the screen. Has anyone else seen this before? I am running the Porteus v09 32-bit release. Any Ideas?

Thanks
DilbertLinux

[Ahau]

Hmmm...

I think you're right about it being an issue with your video driver. I don't think Porteus was designed with Mac's in mind. Try following this guide:
https://porteus.org/info/docs/37-instal ... blems.html

Try using the VESA boot option to see if you can get that (less sophisticated) driver to work. If not, boot to text mode and get us some of the logs mentioned in the doc above.

[DilbertLinux]

Just a quick question. How do you get the logs from a system that has to boot from CD-ROM? Since you can't boot a MacBook Air from a USB stick (well without jumping through a lot of hoops).

[Ahau]

You could put the flashdrive in the computer, but not boot from it. Put the porteus CD in and boot from that. Porteus should find and mount the flashdrive and you can copy your log files to it, as described in the HOWTO referenced above. If Porteus can find and mount your hard drive, you could also send them there.

I do wonder if it'd be possible to put porteus on a flashdrive, put the porteus CD and Porteus USB drive in, boot off the CD, then use PLoP to boot off the USB. Not useful for you now, but if you can get a driver working for the video card it might be of some use.

[DilbertLinux]

I have found out if i install the Nvidia driver for the card in the MacBook (Geforce 320M) it works great. Now i just need to figure out how to build a lzm that can load the Nvidia driver for me when i boot the computer.

I have built a test one but i can't seem to get it to load the nvidia kernel module right. Any suggestions?

[Ahau]

If you got the Nvidia driver to compile properly, then my guess is that the nouveau driver is interfering with it. Try booting with the "nomodeset" cheatcode.

We should have an Nvidia module in the repo for V09, but I'm not seeing it right now. We dont' have one yet for V1.0 RC3 yet, either...hopefully we will have one up there soon (RC3 just came out).

If the "nomodeset" cheatcode works for you, then you have 3 options:
1) Blacklist nouveau in /etc/modeprobe.d/blacklist.conf, and remaster the xzm (can't recall which module it's in, off the top of my head)
2) add "nomodeset" cheatcode to porteus.cfg
3) remove nouveau driver from /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers in 002-xorg.xzm and remaster the xzm

Then, remaster the ISO and burn it to CD

[DilbertLinux]

Tried the "nomodeset" cheatcode and the boot processes stops just before the X Session starts. I get a blank screen with "Starting up X11 session manager..." printed in the upper left corner.

Is there any way to get a HOW to to make a driver lzm for this release? I got close but when i use my lzm to try and install the Nvidia driver and start X i get a message box that says it could start kdestartconfig and then one that says it couldn't start kinit and stops at that point. I think i have all the files in the right place just need to get the kernel mod loaded correctly.

Thanks for the help.

[Ahau]

Unfortunately, I lack the know-how to create the driver -- maybe someone else knows. If you don't get more help on this thread from someone else, your best bet will be to wait for the release of V1.0 FINAL this weekend, that release will have an NVIDIA driver created for it, and it will be the more recent version that includes support for your graphics card (in looking at NVIDIA's site, it looks like support for the 320M was just added).

Out of curiosity, did you have any luck with the VESA boot option?

[DilbertLinux]

Thanks for the help.

The VESA option gave the same results as the standard boot. I did have the VESA option a few time fail to boot correctly. It would stop a random places in on the boot screen (in phase 2 by the link you gave me). Since i wasn't able to get at any of the logs since i had to boot from CD i can't really debug it beyond that. Porteus does work on my old MacBook Air 1.1 but that uses a Intel based video card not Nvidia.

I can compile and install the new Nvidia driver on my MacBook but of course i have to do that every time i boot since i can't at the moment save the files. I am going to look at the lzm from the Slax distro and see if i can figure out how to build a module to load the correct files.

It would be nice if Macs where a little nicer about booting from USB. I pulled my hair out a year ago tring to figure that one out and was only able to successfully do it on a few MacBooks.

[Ahau]

OK -- to clarify, have you been able to get Porteus to work by compiling the driver from text mode? If so, you could install the driver, and then use the 'save-changes' script, here: http://porteus.org/distro-download/port ... rtain-time, to extract any files that you've added or modified in the last few minutes. it places all of those files in a directory, which you can then clean up (you might get some files that aren't from NVIDIA) and turn into a module with dir2lzm. Then, you could remaster your ISO with that module included.

It's kind of a shot in the dark at this point... hopefully some of this is helpful

[DilbertLinux]

That worked. I was able to install the Nvidia Driver in text mode and then using the above script pull the driver files into an module. I changed the boot config file to give me an option to boot with the standard driver or with the Nvidia driver depending on what type of Mac i am booting on.

Thanks for all the help.

[Ahau]

Great!

Also, V1.0 RC3 has an Nvidia driver module on the repo now, that might work better for anyone who'd rather not compile their own in text mode Final release for 1.0 should be out in the near future, which will work even better

Glad you got it running, DilbertLinux!