[BLISS ROMS Development] talljosh:
Bliss OS on Ideapad D330

I've been trying to live boot Bliss OS on my Ideapad D330 (there are lots of configurations of D330 - mine is the 1920x1200 / 128 GB / N4000 configuration). My observations so far are:

1. When trying to boot normally the device display is garbled. But even despite the corruption I can tell than it's getting no further than the boot animation. I've left it on the boot animation for a long time (> 10 minutes) and it just keeps running the animation but getting no further - except for one time when the animation froze and as far as I could tell the whole device hung. Booting with nomodeset didn’t fix it.

[IMG="Garbled display during boot"]https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/RN908Bnyw9UoCSPrUhlSw38oaREZ7fcnsvHUMRGYS402MuHdZmlvWRfsPac1zeJj_rGKXWG_0eJqXz5MSCQVhmIE582IAvEZBEMfT-Cllf5-udw5pilWlgin1-q_NCoBWkKSTqYWYQ=w1586-h893-no[/IMG]

2. When I connect an external display via HDMI and try to boot Bliss OS the external display works and shows what would be on the top half of a portrait-orientation device screen. Further results are mixed. Mostly the device's display is just completely black, but one time the device display turned on and displayed everything perfectly (not garbled). I haven’t been able to reproduce that though. Sometimes Bliss gets stuck on the boot animation, but sometimes it gets all the way to a lock screen and desktop. In either case I can often use Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get to a virtual terminal (on the external display). One challenge here is that the external display is only showing half a screenful, so once the prompt gets into the bottom half of the screen I can't see what I'm doing. The other challenge is I don't really know what I'm looking for. When it was stuck on the boot animation I switched to a virtual terminal and ran dmesg and it was full of SQUASHFS errors. One of the times that it got all the way to a lock screen I switched to a virtual terminal and ran dmesg and didn't see anything amiss, so I guess the SQUASHFS errors are real errors. (Oh, also, the lock screen seems to periodically crash and restart.)

[IMG="Part of dmesg output during infinite boot."]https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/3EDVZIegY-PoJLE6WPI6GJkuSxh5jl5yq5T5H45vbyjDLz0yOP1IdTid8kp3qP48z5AHPvjiHXPkFR-zjpjf2rRSvNgn1fzyj1mQ4Vn6yCLZLJ-LB_qea72IRhZ8tlbH7wjbrhLpignlOZccmcHdXEOTblOjD5pnBd2avX-PfsNw_Q4X0tL24-fOWqYb3jRvb1PWO83xRa0Ry7RFNzs7AlupU6_nlhaD1SklSHtxWqn5OZuSBqwDaSG_5elsAIaoelUCbs1WrY4HHpPyXqJGzeIlFl1vIFCme311nvdH_YTog4pCZmsgzVy1nNLzZM5ljF4RTxB23JZyT9M4fCBHT9eFL0uvZrEAi2NagPAQb4MD8BdI8XKbzgxhQKXw-CxpDr7wpBrzJkG111mqjvlg305WJYTReRO80mcD056LeKE--ErmoCKdjdYseYnDHO8HVsDv_L_HUdoeE7j00LA01QQ17EEdqvHwV6yu4ihdufJiUTxkk_TvynFbU_9sqep4VNB2chjXO6YdcRFPNOtMt5N2aFFkqxYTR2rnOXJ-jNf0W48oz_plvwUdse345Lr44-UdbjvKOIYocyGyQ32C0FY5ca6ogVruNO9r7GIWp4nmbd0yybRzrZGedvZWpX7XwFvjq43VnZaH3cVbP0WpedqcARDNF9iOJF2B9SOv7UL8mF0lmqOUFDG6TUOqezcLYhvuh8KnR_J1Pn85zRs6SXqF3bwgfg3X3S6wvky0jeYjNeln=w1586-h893-no[/IMG]

3. I can get the display working on a live boot of Ubuntu 19.04. Initially Ubuntu showed similar issues to those above - the display is garbled when booting with no external display, nomodeset doesn’t help; when booting with an external display connected, the device display is blank but the external display works. But once it booted up with the external display, I was able open display settings, apply a change, and suddenly the internal display worked fine and wasn’t garbled.

(There are other issues such as auto-rotation not working - some people on the Lenovo forums seem to have solutions for Ubuntu (https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Ubuntu/Linux-on-Ideapad-D330/td-p/4296738) but I haven’t pursued these because I can't get past the display issues running Bliss OS on this device.)

So at the moment the display issues are getting in the way of me trying anything else - I’d appreciate any suggestions of what to try next.