Hello - I am able to start X on SliTaz when I boot from the disk image directly in Virtualbox, but not when I put the ISO on a USB stick and launch from Grub2. I'm trying to create a rescue disk with multiple Linux ISOs on it, so I'd really like to get this working. I have tried this in both Virtualbox and on an HP Laptop without success. I can get to a command prompt, so between that and the error messages I'm seeing I suspect this is a video driver issue (specifically, an issue with Vesa or maybe VBE).
The USB disk I've created is set up for UEFI and legacy MBR booting; I've been able to successfully boot other Linux ISOs from it using both UEFI and Legacy MBR boot modes, so I know it's set up correctly. I use Grub2 as my bootloader.
Here's what I know so far:
1) I CAN start X in SliTaz from virtualbox or qemu (Mac host) when I run directly from the ISO file as the disk image (in both MBR and UEFI modes).
2) I CAN start X in SliTaz from qemu (Mac host) when I launch the ISO from the USB stick (in MBR mode).
3) I CAN'T start X in SliTaz from virtualbox when I launch the ISO from the USB stick (in MBR or UEFI mode).
4) I CAN start X on other Linux ISOs from the USB stick (Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and Kali)
5) I CAN'T start X in SliTaz on my HP laptop from the USB stick (in UEFI mode).
I have tried using all three of the Virtualbox graphics controllers for case #2 above; and this doesn't seem to make a difference. In order to do a side-by-side comparison, I've tried to copy the boot parameters in case #1 from isolinux.cfg into my grub.cfg (although I'm not an expert in this area so I may have gotten it wrong); I've also set them both to use the same graphics controller (VBoxVGA).
I'm including screenshots of the full Xorg log file for the failed launch from the USB stick - sorry, I don't have a way to copy text from the VBox terminal. But I believe the relevant part is here:
LoadModule: "int10"
Loading /usr/lib/X11/modules/libint10.so
...
VESA(0): initializing int10
(EE) VESA(0): V_BIOS address 0xb8480 out of range
I get that same address error when I try to boot the USB stick from my HP laptop as well. For comparison, when I boot directly from the SliTaz ISO image (in either virtualbox or qemu), it loads correctly with the message VESA(0): Primary V_BIOS segment is 0xC000
. I couldn't find much info when googling around for what that address out of range might mean, but it sounds like addresses below 0xC000 actually aren't valid for vesa bios.
Here is my grub.cfg entry for SliTaz on the USB:
set extract_path="/AIO/Files/Linux/slitaz-rolling.iso"
menuentry "[1] Slitaz" --hotkey=1 {
loopback loop ${extract_path}
linux (loop)/boot/bzImage lang=C kmap=us rw root=/dev/null video=-32 autologin
initrd (loop)/boot/rootfs4.gz (loop)/boot/rootfs3.gz (loop)/boot/rootfs2.gz (loop)/boot/rootfs1.gz
}
I have also tried adding nomodeset
to the linux
line - different errors in that case, but X still fails to start. For completeness, I'm also attaching the output of lspci -k
and lsmod
. It's also worth noting that when I went through the steps to install the VirtualBox guest additions (including the vbox video drivers) then I could start X; however that's not a good solution for me since I would need to go through those steps every time I wanted to boot from the live ISO, and it also doesn't solve the issue of seeing the same error when I boot from the USB stick on my HP Laptop. But it does tell me this is likely a vesa problem, since it starts to work properly once I go through the steps of installing the Virtualbox-specific video drivers.