Mageia 5 Beta 3 UEFI experience: boot from usb disk OK !!

[bertaerts]

https://wiki.mageia.org/en/UEFI_how-to#Preparation_of_USB_stick
is missing that the FAT32 partition must be made bootable.
I did that with GParted and put the partition with flag "legacy-boot".
That way my USB stick booted on my Dell Inspiron 17R SE 7720 in UEFI Mode and I could select Mageia 5 Beta 2 Live USB.
I got a working desktop with proprietary nVIDIA driver.
But in the end, when I asked to shutdown, my screen started flashing white disturbed at random and there was some clicking noise.
I quickly turned my laptop off.
Fortunately there was no damage...
I still plan to install M5B2 on an external USB disk.

Mageia-5-beta2-LiveDVD-KDE4-x86_64-DVD was used.

[bertaerts]

I now used an external USB disk of 150 GB.
With GParted in Mageia 4 I created a GPT partition table on this disk with:

sde1 300 MB FAT32
sde2 50 GB ext4 for root
sde3 4 GB linux-swap
sde4 96 GB ext4 for home

I've put my laptop in UEFI mode and booted from USB stick.
I installed Mageia 5 beta 2 on my external harddisk using install via USB menu option.
I did custom partitioning and put:

sde1 as /boot/efi
sde2 as /
sde4 as /home

I used grub2 and installed it on sde2, the root partition.
I can now boot from my external usb disk and see grub2 menu.
If I select Mageia, I get a black window with something of ram disk and then the complete screen becomes black.
There is still some hard disk activity but after a few minutes sreen is still empty.

Just like the usb stick with install medium has different entries for dvd and usb, should I do something special to boot UEFI grub2 from external usb disk?

[bertaerts]

Mageia team wants us to test Mageia 5 beta 2.
But what is the best medium to report issues or ask for help?
I thought that would be this Cauldron Testing forum...

[doktor5000]

For UEFI, please have a look at the other thread viewtopic.php?f=15&t=8903
and also the errata entry: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_5_Err ... ore_5beta3

Discussing current issues ... your best bet is either here in the forum, but there don't seem that many active Cauldron users around,
or maybe on #mageia-qa IRC channel to ask for help or simple issues during testing.

Reporting (reproducible) issues should be done via bug reports: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/How_to_report_a_bug_properly

[bertaerts]

I now installed Mageia 5 beta 3.
Thanks to all Mageia developers and testers, there is great progress made from beta two to three !!!

I now could install M5B3 to an external USB harddisk and it boots.
On my Dell Inspiron 17R SE 7720 which currently uses legacy boot, I can now start using UEFI
I made a GPT partition table on the external USB hard disk:

Code: Select all

sdd1 fat32         100 MB      --> /boot/EFI
sdd2 ext4       100000 MB root --> /
sdd3 linux-swap   8192 MB
sdd4 ext4       400000 MB home --> /home
sdd5 ext4       250000 MB backup
sdd6 ntfs       200000 MB ntfs


Put the laptop in UEFI and booted the USB key (prepared as described earlier) with M5B3.

There is no longer choice between
+ USB or no USB in boot menu.
+ grub or grub2

The only bad impression of the install process comes at the end.
When it is ready, you need to reboot.
Then the screen starts flashing like hell for a few seconds.
Random white dot pattern. This was also the case with M5B2.
I have nVIDIA GeForce GT 650 M with proprietary driver.
In the end of install the screen should turn off !!
This looks very un-professional.

But the installed M5B3 shuts down properly without flashing lights

Then why did uid 500 become 1000 ????
When I copy Mageia 4 home partition data to M5B3 I get unaccessible files.
So my trick was in M4 to do
su
chmod -R o+r *
chmod -R o+r .*
and then copy. Is there a better way?

The Mageia-5-beta3-LiveDVD-KDE4-x86_64-DVD.iso could not be installed in VMware Workstation 11.
Host is Mageia 4 x86_64.
Guest is UEFI Windows 8.1 where I wanted to add M5B3.
M5B3 iso is loaded as virtual dvd drive in VMware.
The iso has no label MGALIVE I think.
There is an error message about MGALIVE.
I could install M5B3 with Windows 8.1 using the USB stick earlier described.

The quality of VLC video playing is extremely bad in KDE.
Even moving around a Dolphin window gives very ugly border effects.
Earlier found for Mageia 4 configuration did the job:
KDE System Settings / Desktop effects / Advanced
Compositing type OpenGL 3.1
Qt graphics system Raster
Tearing prevention Full scene repaints
Doing so does not yet improve.
Second configuration:
Solution for reboot lost setting : Adding
export __GL_YIELD="USLEEP"
to /etc/profile fixes it.
This way video's play OK and window moves are OK.
But I do not understand the meaning/working of USLEEP.
Can someone explain?
And why is this not the default in M5 ?

[doktor5000]

Then why did uid 500 become 1000 ????
When I copy Mageia 4 home partition data to M5B3 I get unaccessible files.
So my trick was in M4 to do
su
chmod -R o+r *
chmod -R o+r .*
and then copy. Is there a better way?

The why - because the range from uid 500 - 999 is nowadays being used by system accounts, and most modern distros assign uid's > 1000.
May be a bit unobvious from the release notes, but was extensively discussed on the mailing list. See the las bullet at
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_5_Rel ... stallation

For the better way, depends how you copy. I also migrated from uid 500 -> 1000 and it was pretty easy.
Did it something like this as root in singleuser mode:

Code: Select all

uid_old=500
id_new=doktor5000

usermod -u 1000 -g 1000 ${id_new}

find /home/${id_new} -owner ${uid_old} -exec chown ${id_new} {} +
find /home/${id_new} -group ${uid_old} -exec chown :${id_new} {} +


[doktor5000]

I created
Bug 15307 - Mageia 5 beta 2/3 At end of install FLASHING screen with nVIDIA