Installing 4 Puppy Linuxes on thumb drive - screen is black (solved)

[cobaka]

Hello all:

I wish to install 4 puppies on a single thumb drive. These are uPupBB32, uPupBB64, FossaPup, Slack-Pup15

The problem in brief: I installed the four Puppies and created the bootloader (using GRUB4DOS).
Hardware used to install: The PC I am typing on now. This is my everyday working desktop. MOBO is Gigabyte.
The method I used to install: uPupBB64 with ROX & manual copy (click an ISO, drag & drop the files into a first-level folder on sdb3).
MikeSLR described this method on this forum. I used this method many times to install Puppy Linux.

Normally I boot this PC from the (internal) HDD. This is to uPupBB64, with the monitor I refer to below.
Basically I'm saying the hardware is "A" - ok.

That's background. Now more context to the installation.
After installing the 4 Puppies I rebooted this PC using F12 to select the boot device (the USB thumb-drive):
I booted uPupBB64 to the desktop (ie xorg). After booting uPupBB64 I shut down this Puppy, as normal.
I did not configure kbd, internet, anything. Just booted, saw everything looking good - shut down.

BUT - when I boot FossaPup I end up on a black screen.
i see the boot process begin. The Gigabyte mobo reports progress; the screen characters change from lge to small.
The screen goes black. I can get control (to the terminal) using ctrl+alt+backspace. Doing this I hear 'woof, woof'.
I can start xorgwizard from the keyboard.
Having tried various configs (using xorgWizard). None got me to the desktop.
I suspect strongly everything is working except the xwin config variables.

Below you see additional info supplied by PupSys-Info + uPupBB64 when I boot as normal.
VGA controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Caicos [Radeon HD 6450/7450/8450 / R5 230 OEM] [1002:6779]
• Kernel Driver: radeon
• Memory Used by Driver: 1312.00 KB
• Path: /lib/modules/4.19.23/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/radeon/radeon.ko
• Description: ATI Radeon
• Video RAM: 1024M

I would like to install 4 bootable puppies on this single thumb-drive.
I believe the only problem involves the video driver setting/variables.
I tried this on a different PC with the same result: uPupBB64 worked, for FossaPup & SlackPup15 I got a black screen.

Any suggestions about how to make this puppy bark?

cobaka

[bigpup]

Boot with something that will get you to a working desktop.

You say you are using Grub4dos boot loader.

Find the file menu.lst on the drive partition.

Open it in a text editor.

It will have entries for booting the different Puppy versions.

Pick one that is not booting correctly. (DO NOT CHANGE AN ENTRY THAT IS WORKING)

Add this to the end of the kernel line

Code: Select all

radeon.modeset=0

Example:
kernel /fossapup6495/vmlinuz pdrv=24a14d90-6d75-4276-a6a0-ef026f8d07cf psubdir=/fossapup6495 pmedia=atahd pfix=fsck radeon.modeset=0

Save the change when you close the text editor.

Now try to boot that entry.

If this works.
You will need to make this edit to the other not working entries.

[bigpup]

If above does not help.

Copy and paste into a post the contents of the menu.lst file so we can see the entries.

[bigpup]

Did you try and edit the menu.lst entry for one of the Puppies that booted to black screen?

Adding radeon.modeset=0 to the end of the kernel line in the entry?

[cobaka]

@bigpup

Made the recommended change.
Result: joy!
Thank you bigPup.

cobaka.