XFCE live 14.1 fails to boot on Asus M4A79

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Salix Live XFCE i686 boots fine on 2 out of 3 machines I've tried.

It works on an Asus P4GE-VM with single core Pentium 4 at 2.4gHz and 2gb ram.

It works on an Asus M2N68-AM Plus with a 3-core AMD Phenom 8850 with 2gb ram.

But on my primary machine, an Asus M4A79T with quad core AMD Phenom II X4 Processor 965 at 3.4gHz and 4gb ram, booting halts with the following on the screen:

Loading SquashFS module 01-core.slm
Loading SquashFS module 02-basic.slm
Loading SquashFS module 03-full.slm
Loading SquashFS module 04-common.slm
Loading SquashFS module 05-kernel.slm
Loading SquashFS module 06-live.slm
*** Live system ready ***

INIT: version 2.88 booting

Nothing else happens. The DVD drive spins down. I have to hit the hardware reset or hard power off to get out.

Any idea why Salix would boot on the older and lower spec machines, but not on the M4A79T?

Thanks for any thoughts you may have.

[ChuangTzu]

maybe you need a newer kernel, 14.1 kernel might be too old for your system.

viewtopic.php?f=22&t=6267&p=36544&hilit ... nel#p36544

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Do I understand right that the 14.1 live kernel is 3.10.77?

This mainboard was made in 2009, so it seems unlikely that I'd need a newer kernel. I've tried several other distros on it, with kernels from 2.6.33 to 3.14.55. All of them booted successfully.

So far, Salix Live is the first modern distro I've tried that's refused to boot.

I'll try the x86_64 version.

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Progress! salixlive64-xfce-14.1 boots to the desktop. Hurrah!

Annnnd ... that's all. A big, bold cursor just sits there in the center of the screen. Neither mouse nor keyboard does anything.

I suppose I'm exposing my ignorance, but I have no clue how to diagnose this, nor any idea where to go from here.

The Asus manual says this mainboard has an AMD 790FX/SB750 chipset. Is it unsupported?

And, again, Salix Live is the first modern distro I've tried so far that's failed to boot to a usable system on this hardware.