Problem booting PCLinuxOS

[accguy9009]

I have been fooling around with the live CD of PCLinuxOS. I liked what I saw. I even got my wireless Netgear USB adapter working. The PC has older hardware, P3 800MHz, 512 ram, 128MB PCI Nvidia 5200 video card. Windows XP on main hard drive. The slave drive I installed PCLinuxOS. 8GB for OS, 2GB swap, 50GB home. Grub works fine. XP boots fine. When I attempt to boot into Linux everything goes fine all devices get OK and right before the OS should boot I get this

Telling INIT to go to single user
sh-3.1#

Nothing will let me get past this.I did not set up a password.

Why is this happening? What is the fix?

 

[Nothinman]

There's got to be more than that, what you posted isn't even an error and just indicates that you told it to boot into single user mode. I don't know what the default runlevel in PCLinuxOS is but try typing 'telinit 5' and see what that gets you.

 

[accguy9009]

I tried this. i thought it was going to work. I was then prompted for my logon information
and password but it still would not boot up.

 

[postmortemIA]

try ubuntu? I would think ubuntu has better hardware support, and has decent live cd.

 

[accguy9009]

I am downloading it now but the mirrors are slow. I have used the live cd in the past of 5.0
Ubuntu and after using the live CD of PCLinuxOS I thought I had found my distro.

 

[postmortemIA]

Originally posted by: accguy9009
I am downloading it now but the mirrors are slow. I have used the live cd in the past of 5.0
Ubuntu and after using the live CD of PCLinuxOS I thought I had found my distro.

well get European mirrors, it is middle of night for them now, so nobody s d/ling there..

 

[Nothinman]

Or just use bittorrent, since 7.10 was just released there's a lot of activity.

 

[Brazen]

Here is links to the torrents for Ubuntu Gutsy.

 

[accguy9009]

thanks, I got the download. Do I have enough hardware to run this distro?

 

[accguy9009]

Ubuntu 7.10 will not boot into the live CD. Ran disk check and tried to boot into the safe graphics mode, no dice. Mandriva will not boot either. So I try PCLinuxtinyflux, the version for old hardware like this piece of junk I am working with. instals fine just like its big brother. I get the same issue,

Telling INIT to go to single user
sh-3.1#

So I type in telinit 5 and a splash screen comes up saying I have an issue with my graphical interface not being correctly configured. After backing out it tries to boot again, this time I get the failed notification that it can not recogonize etho 0 and a Daemon failure. This system only has wireless access. During the live CD set up I selected wireless but to not run at start up. I have no idea what the issue is but grub still works fine, Win XP still runs. I can watch DVDS and even play Halo on this ancient unit. Why no Linux?

 

[Nothinman]

It's obviously an issue with the nvidia drivers and your 5200, are you sure that's what's in there?

 

[accguy9009]

Real sure

 

[Nothinman]

I'm sure it's fixable and that box is more than fast enough to run any distro comfortably but I'm not sure what to tell you. It's pretty odd that all of those distros would have the same problem, unless you happen to be doing something that's causing them all to fail that way.

On the Ubuntu LiveCD hit F6 (or whatever it is to get to the GRUB cli) and remove the quiet and splash options and see if you get any errors during bootup.

 

[accguy9009]

I suspected it was an Nvidia issue as well. So I went and enabled the onboard Intel graphics and hooked the display up and tried to boot into Linux, same error message.
I have a dual boot on my laptop with XP and PCLinuxOS. I guess I will have to live with that. I just thought I could use this old thing as a music/movie box with Kaffene and Amorak. What is so odd is how well the Live Cd runs on this old box.

 

[accguy9009]

I will give that a try. I also am going to try Ubuntu 6.06. I see they will be supporting that one for a while. I got virtually no response on the PCLinux forum. Thanks for your suggestions.

 

[Nothinman]

I'm not sure how long 6.06 will be supported now that 7.10 is released and AFAIK it's the new LTS version. Although if 6.06 installs alright you might be able to upgrade from it to 7.10.

 

[accguy9009]

The Ubuntu site says Ubuntu 6.06 LTS - Supported to 2009. The hope is of course that I can upgrade.

 

[trmiv]

8.04 (Hardy Heron) will be the next LTS Ubuntu release.

 

[jsalpha2]

I am surprised that you got no response on the PCLOS Forum. Is your monitor and screen resolution standard? Did you format the slave drive? I am not a linux guru, but I have played with the KDE and Gnome versions of the PCLOS Live CDs. If you are having problems with Ubuntu and Mandriva as well, the problem could be your cd burner. If the md5 sums match and you burn to good media at low speed things should work. I have run all three live cds on similar hardware, but with an ATI video card. I haven't tried a hard drive install yet. Probably
will try on another computer soon. Don't want to risk my main machine.
Good Luck

 

[accguy9009]

I actually ran the check media option on the live CD. Checked out fine . I did redownload the ISO and reburned, same story.The CD burner works perfectly. I thought it was a video card issue. I had a PCI Radeon 9250 w/128 MB of Ram sitting around so I uninstalled the Nvidia card. Same issue. This machine will not run even the live cd of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS , 7.04 or 7.10. Linuxmint 3.1 won't run. I get a message saying I have problems with my graphical user interface X or something like that. Puppy Linux 3.1 seemed to work well enough in the live cd, but it did not like the Netgear driver using NDIS wrapper so I could not get the wireless working. The same driver sets up the wireless perfectly using the live cd in PCLinuxoS2007. This computer is in my garage so it has to connect wirelessly. The new video card works great in XP home.

Yes my monitor and screen resolutions are standard.

I just installed PCLinuxOS2007 in virtualbox and I got the same hangup after installing and taking out the CD and booting the OS:

Telling INIT to go to single user
sh-3.1#

this machine does not like Ubuntu or vice versa as Ubuntu will not work in virtualbox. here are my virtualbox settings:



General
Name
newpclinos
OS Type
Linux 2.6
Base Memory
256 MB
Video Memory
64 MB
Boot Order
Hard Disk, CD/DVD-ROM
ACPI
Enabled
IO APIC
Disabled
 

Hard Disks
Primary Master
newpclinos.vdi [Normal, 8.00 GB]
 

CD/DVD-ROM
Host Drive
E:
 

Floppy
Not mounted

 

Audio
Adapter
Windows DirectSound
 

Network
Adapter 0
NAT
 

Serial Ports
Disabled

 

USB
Device Filters
2 (2 active)
 

Shared Folders
None

 

Remote Display
Disabled

 

Any suggestions would be helpfull.

 

[accguy9009]

Finally figured out my problem. It was the PCI graphics card. Even though I used two different working cards it appears Linux out of the box does not care for this. I tried(again) the 810 chipset integrated graphics using Mandriva 2008. Works like a charm. Wireless USB adapter support was incredible. Not even one command line entry was needed. I love Mandriva 2008!!

Thank you to all who offered suggestions