Trident fails to boot on Dell Laptop with nVidia graphics chip

[JohnBlood]

Last night, I attempted to install BETA3 on my Dell Lattitude D630 laptop. My laptop has an NVIDIA Quadro NVS 135M graphics chip. According to nVidia's website, that particular chip is supported by nvidia-driver-340. During my initial install attempt, I selected the 340 driver. The installation finished successfully. However, upon reboot, the nVidia driver appeared to fail. Below is a screenshot of the error.

I attempted to reinstall with the main nVidia driver, but the same error occurred.

I successfully installed TrueOS desktop on the same laptop earlier this year.

[RodMyers]

Have you attempted to use RC3?

[JohnBlood]

No, but I will today.

[JohnBlood]

I tried RC 3 and was still unable to boot into a desktop. I tried installing without picking which driver to install, installing the nVidia 340 driver and installing the nv driver. Interestingly, when I tried to boot after installing the nv driver, it looked like it almost reached a desktop, but was stuck with a black screen.

[RodMyers]

Have you tried the RELEASE ISO?

[JohnBlood]

Not yet. I will soon.

[JohnBlood]

@RodMyers I tried installing the Project Trident and ran into issues. However, I think that the thumb drive that I was using might have contributed to the problems. I bought a new thumb drive and will again tonight. If I run into issues again, I'll post as much info as possible. :)

[JohnBlood]

I tried the latest release (update 3) and it failed to boot to a GUI. I downloaded release the 18.12 release and the zpool import failed. I will try again with update 3 with my new thumb drive.

[JohnBlood]

I flashed Project Trident 18.12 Update 3 to a new 16GB thumb drive and tried to install but I kept getting the "zpool import failed" error. I figured that there was conflict from the previous failed installed, so I installed a Linux distro.. I reflashed Project Trident 18.12 Update 3, but the install kept failing at zpool import. Then, I decided to change the name of the zpool to trident2 and turned on swap. Once I did this, the installation completed. However, I still can't get it to boot to a gui. I tried both nvidia 340 and the open source nv driver.

[RodMyers]

is this still an issue?

[JohnBlood]

@RodMyers Sorry for not replying sooner. I am unable to test this because the laptop I was using is not working due to water damage. I will try again once I get it fixed.

[JohnBlood]

I finally got my system fixed and installed the most recent stable iso. It installed successfully, but would not boot to a desktop. I logged in via the terminal prompt and typed startx. The resulting printout said "Fatal server error: no screen found. Here is a picture of the screen:

Interestingly, I also ran into issues connecting to the ntp server. If I didn't log in, I kept getting a message that "Can't find host 0.freebsd.pool.ntp.org: Name does not resolve." This happened on both wifi and ethernet.

Hopefully, we can resolve this issue because I'd really like to run Project Trident on that system.

[beanpole135]

Closed: Overcome by events.

With the move to Void Linux this issue will go away as it no longer uses FreeBSD drivers.