For livecd-2.6_11-29-2003 on a Pentium classic (FIC Birch 5200-CD), as soon as BIOS boots the CD, the default ("gentoo") kernel starts up, in framebuffer mode. For this particular display (Neomagic Corp. MagicGraph 128-ZV), the graphics mode is invalid, resulting in a message from the kernel something like, "The display mode you specified is invalid. Press enter to list available modes or space to continue." Always reproducible at my end, though I'd appreciate confirmation on X86 and other architectures. There's a chance that the booting of the kernel without the boot prompt and the display mode issues are entirely different and so should be filed under different bugs, apologies. Anyhow, I expected a boot prompt and got the above message-alike, with no evident workaround. There was mentioned on IRC a workaround of holding left Shift until after a few seconds of Gentoo screen, but this is very hard to reproduce when you can't see the thing :-( and all efforts at doing so have never really helped, that same error comes up. The boot line for the nofb kernel (needed for BRLTTY http://www.mielke.cc/brltty/ ) was to be: "nofb dopcmcia dokeymap noraid nousb". I understood from #gentoo@irc.freenode.net that the boot problem was a known bug (Livewire forgot to take out a testing option, apparently) but didn't find any mention of it here on Bugzilla - apologies if there is a known bug filed, mark this as duplicate.
The boot options are really required in certain situations, including mine as described, for example to start PCMCIA for a network card in a notebook and/or to avoid certain nasties on buggy/incompatible hardware. This kind of makes this bug a tad major. Also, the behavior is now confirmed.
This is a experimental livecd, you can set capslock or hold shift to get a boot prompt. The issue has been addressed in local cds.
