Blank screen

CentOS 8.0 installation boots into a blank screen

CentOS 8.0 was released earlier today with a bug inherited from RHEL 8.0 upstream.

The bug manifests itself when Server with Gui is selected as the Base Environment when installing on a Hyper-V virtual machine. After copying all the files needed into the hard drive Anaconda will boot into a blank screen.

The problem is made a little worse because Server with Gui is the default selection.

In yesterday’s post, I’ve shown how the solution proposed in RHEL 8.0’s release notes didn’t quite work when the system wasn’t (yet) registered with Red Hat Subscription Management.

Since CentOS has no such thing, the solution described in the release notes can be applied as is. That is, as long as you have internet connectivity.

But what if the system at hand is isolated from the internet? Then again we have to resort to installing from the installation media.

This time though, we can take advantage of the repo configuration files installed with the operating system that point to the installation media.

yum repolist --all
yum repolist --all
yum repolist –all

From yesterday, we already know that base-x is contained in AppStream, so from the list above we probably want to take a better look at c8-media-AppStream.

[root@centos-8-1905 ~]# yum repoinfo --all c8-media-AppStream
 Last metadata expiration check: 0:24:40 ago on Tue 24 Sep 2019 09:24:39 PM -03.
 Repo-id      : c8-media-AppStream
 Repo-name    : CentOS-AppStream-8 - Media
 Repo-status  : disabled
 Repo-baseurl : file:///media/CentOS/AppStream, file:///media/cdrom/AppStream, file:///media/cdrecorder/AppStream
 Repo-expire  : 172,800 second(s) (last: unknown)
 Repo-filename: /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Media.repo
 [root@centos-8-1905 ~]#

As can be seen the repo is configured to search for its files at one of the URLs defined by the Repo-baseurl property. Let’s mount the installation media into /media/CentOS.

[root@centos-8-1905 ~]# mkdir /media/CentOS
[root@centos-8-1905 ~]# mount /dev/sr0 /media/CentOS/
 mount: /media/CentOS: WARNING: device write-protected, mounted read-only.

Now we can invoke yum groupinstall specifying c8-media-AppStream as the source repository.

[root@centos-8-1905 ~]# yum --repo=c8-media-AppStream -y groupinstall base-x
yum --repo=c8-media-AppStream -y groupinstall base-x
yum –repo=c8-media-AppStream -y groupinstall base-x

As yesterday, rebooting now should load the graphical user interface for the final steps of the installation process.

Published by

Alfred Myers

I have been interested in computers since I got my hands on a magazine about digital electronics back in 1983 and programming them has been paying the bills since 1991. Having focused on Microsoft-centric technology stacks for the best part of two decades, in recent years I’ve been educating myself on open source technologies such as Linux, networking and the open web platform.

4 thoughts on “CentOS 8.0 installation boots into a blank screen”

  1. Confirmed. The problem also occurs when installing on a Oracle VM VirtualBox virtual machine, using NAT network configuration setup on VBox Manager. Although my pc is connected to an internet connection, the problem still occurs. Thanks for this great post. I will try the solution. Thumbs up.

    1. I’m glad you liked it, Ivan. Let me know if you get it working. I’m specifically interested in knowing if the missing base-x package group is the culprit for “Server with GUI” not working on VirtualBox as well.

      1. Your solution got it working. Many thanks. After following your instructions i just have to install the GUI and that’s it.

        yum -y groups install gnome-desktop

        echo “exec gnome-session” >> ~/.xinitrc

        startx

        Thanks bro..

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