[Bug 1530530]

[Snwint-g]

I'm currently out of ideas and it will be tricky to make progress
without such a device at my desk. :-(

Issues I've seen:

- the video bios knows only one video mode with an unusual resolution;
the standard gfxboot script doesn't expect this (and doesn't provide a
theme in this resolution), but that can be trivially adjusted

- it seems that the graphics card can only be accessed via framebuffer;
but gfxboot uses the old method via 64k windows mapped at 0xa0000 for
drawing; I've added a patch that changes this (see link below) - and
which works at least on some test machines

- it still doesn't work here; the patch seems to be ok because you can
(a) draw directly by using the framebuffer pointer and do memory writes
(the dots you see with the test isos) and (b) the debug window is
visible (it's drawn using standard internal routines)

- my suspicion atm is that _reading_ from the framebuffer causes
problems: it's done implicitly internally at a number of places and
can't be avoided (design decision from the old times where free memory
was scarce); also, maybe strange mtrr settings are an issue

I've put the current state into the chrome_fb branch (there's some
translation update that slipped into it which can be ignored). When you
build the 'test_fb' theme, you basically get test iso 7.

https://github.com/openSUSE/gfxboot/tree/chrome_fb

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1530530

Title:
  Installer doesn't show up on some Chromebook

Status in gfxboot-theme-ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in gfxboot package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in gfxboot-theme-ubuntu package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  I downloaded Ubuntu Wily 15.10, then copied into an USB drive in order to use that to install Ubuntu on my Chromebook Pixel 2.
  After selecting the drive to boot from, I only get a terminal that shows up the following lines:

  graphics initialization failed
  Error setting up gfxboot
  boot:

  Same happens with any *buntu ISO image ( I tried KDE and XFCE as well).
  At this point, I tried to download the  Debian8 ISO image and I noticed that the installer doesn't recognize the video size, too but then asks for the user to manually select a suitable video format from a list of options. >From that point on, I was able to install Debian on the chromebook.

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