Help Install

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Hope this does not duplicate to the same place, but I sent the following message to a different input. Here it is:

I have tried 4 or 5 times to install CentOS 7,* and it seems to install, but it won’t boot to KDE or any desktop. It comes up in text mode, and nothing I do will get it into a kde mode.

Or any graphic mode, that I know of. I have enabled a root password, and a user password. I am trying to install on a SSD of 250 GB. The installation appears to work, but it

boots to black screen with white letters. It appears to accept some BASH
commands, but it does not respond to startx or startkde. It appears to respond to su, but that doesn’t

help. (Or sudo, either, but I’m used to su.) I have tried to clear the SSD completely so there are no partitions on it, not even the Windows
1GB boot partition. (I had that, but CentOS

didn’t work so I eliminated it.)

* I downloaded a number of tries and burned each to DVD, (one appeared to be defective) but none of them worked. It would help, perhaps, if the downloads included a verification.

I really want an RPM system with kde, and I used PCLOS for years, but the latest version is a great disappointment, and the last upgrade crashed the machine, which is why I,

having tried their April release, I am coming to CentOS–or trying to.

I don’t know what information I can provide, but the bare-bones of the system are this:

MOBO: Foxxconn G41MXE/G41MXS-K
BIOS: American Megatrends id:0
version 080015, date 10/14/210

CPU:
Intel Cor2Duo E8600 @ 3.33GHz Width 64 bits Closck 333MHz

Memory 8Gib

Display:
NVidia GF 116

All of this worked perfectly with PCLOS for many years. Please help!

Thanx–doug

6 thoughts on - Help Install

  • Try booting one of the “live images” and see if it will work that way. A gui should just show up by magic when it finishes booting.

    You can install CentOS directly from the live image if it works.

  • I downloaded CentOS-7.0-1406x86_64.kdelive.iso, and started it on the machine that I described, which has the 250GB SSD on it. I used the provided md5sum to make sure what I was burning was correct. I then burned the disk with k3B verify, for both the md5sum and the actual download file, and burned the DVD with “verify”
    which succeded. I started to install the DVD at 10:45 PM
    on Saturday, and it is now 12:45 AM Sunday Morning. A long incremented list of large numbers followed by the words,

    “EXPERIMENTAL Support Enabled”

    has been running ever since. I expect it will still be running in the morning when I get up, and after church, when I get home at 1:15PM.

    ***********************************

    Is it possible to

    1: Get a specification of the computer characteristics on which CentOS
    will run?

    1a. Get the computer requirements, especially necescary disk space?

    2: Purchase a copy of a disk which is guaranteed to run a CentOS KDE
    system on the computer which I have described, and
    and if so, from whom?

    –doug

  • This is a pretty vague description.

    Does it boot into the multi-user.target, i.e. the non-graphical login prompt? Are you prompted for a username and password at a login prompt, or just root’s password? It sounds to me like you’re stuck at the emergency rescue shell and not a fully booted system.

    —
    Jonathan Billings

  • So now it is 14 hours later, and it is still spitting out these numbers, once a minute or so. At the bottom of this interminable list, instead of the former quote, it now says: “Use of these features in this kernel is at your own risk.”
    I’d really like to try this system, but it defies me.

    doug

  • It sounds like there is just a fundamental hardware problem with your system. From the age of the BIOS (2010) and the date of RHEL-7 coming out
    2014.. you are at the cusp of upstream hardware support. The problems you are describing could be anything ranging from BIOS/Mobo incompatibility to a whole host of things which would take a while to debug. I would do the following:

    1. See if CentOS-6 runs on the hardware. If an ISO fails to boot either via USB or DVD in a similar way then it may be a hardware issue.
    2. Download an older version of CentOS-7 from vault.CentOS.org and see if that will install.
    3. Start looking at the hammer boot options which various motherboards need. These can range from acpi=off noapic or a slew of others. [Google for ones which might match your hardware.]

    There are 10’s of thousands of motherboards manufactured and trying to enumerate which ones aren’t usable is not something any volunteer project can do.

  • So, that’s an ISO from 2014 with CentOS 7.0.1406. The latest version of CentOS media is 7.6.1810 and you can find ISOs here:
    http://isoredirect.CentOS.org/CentOS/7/isos/x86_64/

    This is part of an error output in 7.0.1406 for XFS support, see this for more details:
    https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/7.0_release_notes/known-issues-storage

    You really ought to use a recent kernel, which you’d get in 7.6.1810.

    The RHEL installation guide mentions this, and the same holds for CentOS. https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/installation_guide/sect-installation-planning-disk-space-memory-x86

    Just install from a recent Image.

    —
    Jonathan