There were two more postings by me with suffix [2] and then [3] pursuant 
to the situation with SL7.2 Live on this particular platform, including 
the Ubuntu description of the hardware.
As far as I can tell, all of the important hardware (harddrive and 
controller, DVD reader/burner, WNIC, NIC, pointing device, 
video//graphics card, sound card, CPU including FPU and MMU, and USB 
devices) are linux supported, including in SL 7.  Have I missed 
something?  The BIOS are "secure boot", but that is a standard issue on 
current X86-64 hardware and "secure boot" (read, proprietary closed 
source vendor controlling) can be disabled for "legacy boot".  The issue 
that causes the dracut complaint is a missing file image on the RAMFS 
that a non-installed (e.g., live) system uses.  The Ubuntu test was with 
a USB flash drive -- would that make a difference?

As far as the older text-based installer, I fully concur with the 
respondent below.  A text based installer should at least be an option 
-- it worked much better.  However, the live non-installed system 
supposedly will not use the installer.  (I point out that the only 
enterprise competitor to EL is SLES, and SLES is much more GUI and 
automated than previous EL versions and also -- from direct experience 
-- is neither easy to configure nor properly supported except for large 
commercial-style configurations.  There also is no equivalent to this 
professional email list serve for any SuSE product to which I had even 
licensed access.)

I understand that Ubuntu is not as stable as EL (although Ubuntu 
advertises support and at least at one point claimed that it could be 
used for production deployments -- something one dare not do with 
unstable non-hardened systems) -- but is the issue here simply one of 
the kernel and drivers?  Red Hat does certify EL 7 for laptops
( 
https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/search/#/category/Laptop?sort=sortTitle%20asc&certifications=Red%20Hat%20Enterprise%20Linux%207&ecosystem=Red%20Hat%20Enterprise%20Linux 
),
but all I could find for EL 7 were products from Lenovo.   Lenovo is not 
that conservative in hardware, and certainly competes with both HP and Dell.

Other than stating that EL 7 will not work, are there any other suggestions?

Yasha Karant

On 04/02/2016 04:40 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 2, 2016 at 12:00 AM, Yasha Karant <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> SL-72-x86_64-2016-02-03-LiveDVDkde.iso would not boot on a HP Pavilion
>> Laptop Computer  model N5R26UA#ABA, although the list of hardware on the
>> machine should have been supported by SL 7.  Fortunately, one of my students
>> works at the store selling the machine, and his manager had a bootable USB
>> flash drive with several 64 bit linuxes on it.  Both ubuntu and mint booted,
>> so, presumably SL 7 should boot.  The DVD image was verified/tested before
>> using it.
>>
>> Below is the (rather long) journalctl output from the attempt to boot SL 7
>> -- can anyone identify what is failing and how to fix it?  We have 14 days
>> to return the machine for full credit provided I do not modify the harddrive
>> (that I shall not do unless we keep the machine and install SL 7).
>>
>> Any suggestions?  Is  there a way to test boot, without install, including
>> X, from the 4 Gbyte regular SL7.2 install DVD (after burning the iso file to
>> a DVD)?
>>
>> Yasha Karant
> [Very long records deleted]
>
> First: SL, like hte upsteam RHEL, is really a stable server grade
> operating system. The kernels will never be bleeding edge, with the
> latest support for the latest laptop chipsets, many of which tended to
> be very leading edge and off-brand. And Ubuntu tends to be leading
> edge: they're not very stable for server grade systems, but rather
> tend to the latest chipsets.
>
> Second. the heavily reduced kernel and configs used by Anaconda for
> the boot operating configurations can be..... problematic. I've also
> had problems with 7. and 7.2, that did *not* happen with 7.0. In fact,
> I just installled a server with 7.0 successfully, and was able to
> update, when 7.1 and 7.2 CD's were unable to boot it.
>
> Third: the "rescue" mode should still be available, adding the word
> "rescue" to the boot kernel options. I really wish they'd list rescue
> mode, and *not* on that ghods-awful X based "spoke and wheel" logic
> installer. The older, text based installer worked very well, took up
> much less screen space, was easier to read, and had consistent layout.
> It also worked *much better* for remote consoles and
> virtualizatization consoles.