I wasn't quite there!

The upgrade to grub 2.06 fixed the boot problem - but when I booted into
chimaera, it came up with a major graphics problem - 640x480 display, no
tty sessions available, and /dev/dri and /dev/fb0 didn't exist: messages
in /var/log/Xorg.0.log saying that the framebuffer couldn't be created.
Graphics driver is nouveau: I considered trying NVidia's own driver, but
I couldn't even boot into rescue mode - the boot sequence never reached
the command prompt!

I mentioned that I have two identical boxes on which I'm working these
problems. Hardware is ASUS H310M motherboard; Intel i5-9600K (6-core);
16g RAM. (It's strange that I've got the two boxes: I accidentally
bought two lots of this kit, and decided to keep the second set as
spares - I then decided to use them to upgrade the old box. Am I ever
glad that I did so ...)

However, the two boxes are not quite identical - one has NVidia GT610
(bought in 2013), the other has an NVidia GT1030 (bought this year).
After upgrading beowulf to chimaera and upgrading to grub 2.06, the
chimaera installation on the box with the old NV card worked fine. It
was the one with the new NV card where the graphics borked.

I swapped the primary disks between the two boxes. The problem was still
on the box with the new NV card.

I did some googling and fortunately found a post which gave me the
solution. I had to install firmware-misc-nonfree. After this, the
graphics were fine on both boxes. Interesting that the new card required
firmware, whereas the old one didn't.

Why NVidia rather than Radeon? I've tried both over the years - but I've
stuck with NV because I just find that the "look" seems to be better -
the display usually seems more solid (less perceptible flicker), the
colours seem clearer, and (especially) the fonts seem more readable.

On Mon, 2022-02-14 at 18:23 +0000, Peter Duffy wrote:

> That fixed the problem! All three systems - chimaera, win7 and CentOS -
> now boot successfully.