Subject: bug#40599: 1.1.0rc2 i686 gui install unreadable

From: "pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2020 23:48:24 +0200

On Mon, Apr 13, 2020 at 11:06:50PM +0200, pelzflorian (Florian Pelz) wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 13, 2020 at 04:02:00PM +0200, Niels Felsted wrote:
> > The laptop is a Acer aspire 3680, with Intel Celeron cpu, 1.5gb ram
> > and the following graphics card:
> 
> Wait it’s Intel??  Sorry I misread.  I thought I had read AMD.

It’s funny how my Acer Aspire 5738PG has an old AMD/ATI Radeon and
only works with uvesafb, while uvesafb causes problems with your Acer
Aspire 3680’S old Intel GPU.

I believe “nomodeset” will help you with rc2, although it is a
regression.  If you run lsmod after pressing Ctrl+Alt+F3, is there a
module called “i915”?  You could try adding a kernel parameter
“modprobe.blacklist=i915” and maybe it won’t break the graphics.

Have you previously used a GNU/Linux distribution with Xorg on the
Acer Aspire (probably yes)?  However could you try if after installing
you even have Xorg graphics support?  If and only if you don’t have
Xorg after installation, maybe you might actually need to add uvesafb
to your config.scm to have graphics support later on.

That is in your /etc/config.scm in the services field add:

(services <here are your other services…>
          (set-xorg-configuration
           (xorg-configuration
            (modules
             (list ;it is important xf86-video-vesa is not listed
              xf86-video-fbdev
              xf86-input-libinput
              ;; you probably don’t need these:
              xf86-input-evdev
              xf86-input-keyboard
              xf86-input-mouse
              xf86-input-synaptics))
            (keyboard-layout keyboard-layout)))
          (service kernel-module-loader-service-type '("uvesafb"))
          (simple-service 'uvesafb-configuration etc-service-type
                          (list `("modprobe.d/uvesafb.conf"
                                  ,(mixed-text-file
                                    "uvesafb.conf"
                                    "options uvesafb v86d=" v86d
                                    "/sbin/v86d mode_option=1024x768\n")))))

and before (services …) a field (kernel-arguments '("nomodeset"))

Regards,
Florian