Feature changed by: Jan Engelhardt (jengelh) Feature #310069, revision 5 Title: run yast2 second stage config in ncurses or VGA mode openSUSE-11.4: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Mandatory Requested by: Bernhard Wiedemann (bmwiedemann) Description: With 11.2 default installs, I have observed 3-4 installs and 2-3 of those ended with a black screen where yast2 second stage configuration should have been. The actual reasons for the black screens differed. One had an ATI graphics driver crash and another used the maximum possible resolution (1600x1200), which the CRT-monitor could not handle. However, from a user perspective, this all came out to the same awful experience - a non-working system that is giving no hint to what might be wrong. Also, before this second stage configuration finished, many of the normal methods to debug and amend such problems can not be used. e.g. adding a "3" for a different runlevel does not work and the user- password is not set (only root). So my suggestion to better the experience is to start out in ncurses or safe VGA mode and at some point (e.g. at end of configuration) prompt the user "I am now trying the $DRIVER graphics driver which might not work. Old settings will be restored in 15 seconds. If you encounter problems, check http://en.opensuse.org/SDB/Graphics/$DRIVER for help [OK] [Cancel]" Of course, it could be argued, that X11-autodetection and drivers should work and bugzilla be involved, but this would not improve the general user-experience for the cases where something breaks anyway. Often quality is not about how well something works, but how well something fails. Discussion: #1: Bruno Friedmann (bruno_friedmann) (2010-07-01 06:19:39) I love the principle of having attention to how we continue if it crash. To add a point to second stage, I encounter many times trouble with complex install ( having 4 or more harddrvie with multiple hdd controller ). Stage2 is launch with kexec, and so we never try the real boot. It's very frustating for users to have finished their installation, start working, and next reboot just have cryptic error message from grub, or not having grub installed on the right disk. ( sorry for this time, I've no idea how we can test this ). For the Xorg part, I'm totally agree with Bernhard, about the warning message and the fallback in case of failure. + #2: Jan Engelhardt (jengelh) (2010-07-19 19:37:38) + Hopefully this is addressed in 11.3 where Xorg-server was bumped to + 1.8.0, fixing some KMS integration issues. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/310069