Re: Bizarre hardware

Michael <[email protected]> Tue, 21 Apr 2026 17:49:15 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.gentoo.user
Message-ID	<2554879.jE0xQCEvom@rogueboard>
On Tuesday, 21 April 2026 16:42:43 British Summer Time Peter Humphrey 
wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I bought a new PC last week, but I couldn't get it to install Gentoo.
> The first hurdle was to get SystemRescue to show its X display. I
> never did find the trick, and now the thing is going back for a
> refund.

What CPU, GPU, MoBo did it possess?


> I tried the Gentoo live CD image, which ran fine with a Nouveau
> graphics driver, and used it to query the hardware. The usual 'lspci
> | grep VGA' returned three interfaces! One Intel, one Nvidia and a
> third, dormant device. I've heard of dual interfaces in a laptop, but
> not a desktop, and certainly not three.

I'm guessing Intel is the integrated graphics cores (iGPU), the Nvidia 
is the dedicated GPU and the third may be some audio or AI processor 
chip, which was not detected by the nouveau driver.


> I also tried installing Gentoo from that image, and all seemed to go
> well until it was time to boot the new system, using grub. It
> couldn't even find its NVMe hardware; I don't mean a device connected
> to it but the interface itself. Then, giving that up, it went on to
> fail to find the USB interface as well.

If the UEFI settings were configured to allow the LiveUSB to detect the 
hardware and drive them, then the installed system should also be able 
to perform the same feat, as long the correct drivers had been 
installed.


> The machine had been designed to ship with Windows, but I specified No
> Operating System.

Sometimes Windows can be useful in interrogating the hardware, if the 
Linux LiveUSB at hand is not capable to do the same without proprietary 
drivers.  On the other hand, the unpleasantness of having to deal with 
Win11 and Copilot requires significant patience.  o_O


> Can anyone shed any light on this?

Without more information and output like lshw, dmesg, lsmod, lsusb -t, 
lspci -nnk, it is difficult to deduce what might have been the problem.
signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 870 B)