#1 2023-07-27 09:19:19

nberidze

New Member

Registered: 2023-07-27

Posts: 2

Live version works fine, but install version causes screen distortion

Dear community,

I am seeking advice about a persistent screen distortion issue during the attempted installation of Bunsenlabs on my iMac Core 2 Duo.

The usual way of dd'ing the ISO to a USB stick did not work, so I opted for rEFInd instead of Grub as bootloader, and prepared the USB stick manually with two partitions, an EFI partition and a Linux partition with the ISO on. I also had to manually copy the vmlinuz and initrd files to the EFI partition to make the iMac boot, because on the ISO these files had the wrong permissions (and an ISO is write protected).

At boot time, at the rEFInd screen, I have two boot options: Live and install. When I choose 'live', the iMac boots up fine and Bunsenlabs works flawlessly, but when I choose the 'install' boot option, the screen quickly turns garbled and distorted, with shifted lines.

Following similar advice I read about issues with graphics distortions during booting of installer software, I attempted issuing different boot parameters to rEFInd at boot time, but none of them made the distortion go away.

I checked what graphics setup Bunsenlabs is using during its live version, and found it is X11 and openbox. Perhaps somewhat naively, I tried issuing some boot parameters like 'openbox' and 'x11' during boot time. Not sure they are real parameters.

Here are some technical details:

iMac Model: Core 2 Duo
Graphics card: ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT
Boot Manager: rEFInd.
Boot Parameters Tried: nomodeset, acpi=off, xorg, x11, openbox, and others.

I'd recommend the community looks into the issue, because I found two other forum threads describing very similar screen distortion problems during installation on different hardware setups, but since I am not allowed to post links, I cannot show you these. But they may be searched for by using the terms 'installer' and 'graphics'.

Both cases remain unsolved, indicating that this issue might be affecting multiple users.

My aim is to achieve a full Bunsenlabs installation on my iMac. If any members have successfully installed Bunsenlabs on similar iMac models or encountered and resolved screen distortion problems, I kindly request you to share your knowledge. Thank you.

nberidze

nberidze

New Member

Registered: 2023-07-27

Posts: 2

Re: Live version works fine, but install version causes screen distortion

Update:

I am happy to report that my screen distortion issues are irrelevant, as I managed to boot the iMac from the regular Bunsenlabs ISO after all. I don't currently know why my previous attempts at dd'ing the ISO to the USB stick failed. Whatever the reason was, I can report that the iMac Core 2 Duo booted into the Bunsenlabs installer flawlessly and that our favorite distro has given new life to this old Apple machine.