ALT+f2 shell doesn't display properly

[John Mongillo]

I built my Chromium OS from source yesterday and I want to make some tweaks to it, but when I hit alt+f2 to enter into command line I get one of two things black screen with white blocks where text should be or a blank screen with a cursor. The cursor moves when I type just doesn't display the text you enter. This, as you can imagine, makes it incredibly hard to work in shell. I got around this before by running shell through CTRL+ALT+T but since I installed to the HDD I have lost that option. I believe the problem is with the fact my laptop has two graphics cards, ones AMD and then an onboard intel chip, I've had trouble with this with other linux distros linux unbuntu, mint, sabayon, and resolve it by switching a boot paramater in GRUB. Does Chromium use GRUB? Where would I find the bootloader? Probably easier is to keep CTRL+ALT+T method, is there a way to do this? Any help would be be much appreciated. Thank you.

5n4r35

[Mike Frysinger]

ctrl+alt+t should work regardless of where you installed it ...

did you try ctrl+alt+f1 rather than f2 ?

do the things you type in actually work ? i.e. can you login & run commands ?

ChromiumOS relies on an external boot loader. if you have a
Chromebook, it's probablly running u-boot and there isn't an easy way
to modify its boot options.
-mike

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[John Mongillo]

ctrl+alt+t works, meaning I open a crosh prompt, I just can't run the shell command. crosh returns "unknow command: 'shell' ".

crtl+alt+f1 does nothing from the main screen. Which makes sense, to me at least.

It appears that I can login and run commands while in ctrl+alt+f2, but I can not be sure because as I said the text doesn't display properly ergo I can't read what I type  or the output of what I type. I can only guess that as the cursor moves its executing my commands. 

Thank you for the help. :) I think getting shell back in the crosh prompt is probably the easiest way to go. How do we go about doing that?

John

[Mike Frysinger]

this sounds like CrOS is detecting your system is not in dev mode so
it went ahead and disabled these things. there was a thread
semi-recently where Richard outlined how that detection occurs. you
should start there to see what is being misdetected in your setup.
-mike

[John Mongillo]

Just posting one final update. I went back and figured since I was going to re-compile an image try x86 instead of x86_64. Long story short that fixed all my ails!! Downside is it takes forever to startup when compared to 64-bit. Small price for a stable and working system. Ran script at https://gist.github.com/rikels/4031126 and now I have everything running 100%!!! If anyone else is having issues on 64-bit try re-compiling as 32-bit worked wonders for me.