Success! I've managed to boot LFS 8.0, X Windows, Firefox and Thunderbird.
I've learned a lot about Linux from this, especially how to boot with an
EFI bios and GTP partitions.
On 5/25/2017 2:32 PM, Ken Moffat wrote:
On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 12:30:56PM -0600, Alan Feuerbacher wrote:
On 5/25/2017 12:24 PM, Kuba wrote:
On Thu, 25 May 2017 12:19:53 -0600, Alan Feuerbacher
<[email protected]> wrote:
First, may I suggest that sendmail is probably not a mail server
which many people want to use. It used to be horrendous to
configure. I run postfix, which provides /usr/sbin/sendmail.
I looked into installing that, but on first glance it looks like a lot
of work configuring it. Comments?
Now that Thunderbird is working, do I need Postfix?
Just mentioning that in case it is something in sendmail that is
hanging.
Turns out sendmail was working ok. But I've disabled it.
The computer itself quits working -- I have to turn the power switch off and
on to reboot to the host system.
A bit more clarification: Normally when Grub starts, the screen goes
blank for a few seconds, the mouse and keyboard lights turn off (I have
an illuminated Logitech keyboard), and after a few seconds it all turns
back on, and you get the Linux startup messages. In my case, everything
went blank, and never turned on again. That's why I had to power cycle
the power supply.
1. My thought process on trying to debug this
With traditional sysvinit, the kernel has invoked init and that has
gone into your chosen runlevel (probably runlevel 3?). I suggest
that you begin by looking at the bootscript for sendmail, to see if
it starts multiple programs. If it does, try adding messages
between them.
I looked at several useful bootlog files in /var/log:
boot.log
kern.log
sys.log
These showed that sendmail was working, along with some potential gotchas.
Alternatively, if sendmail really is running ok then the problem
would be with the *next* script (ordered by the SNN symlink
numbers). But if that next script begins to execute, I would expect
it to report something. So this sounds to me as if sendmail is not
completing.
I ended up disabling all of the stuff that is started by scripts in
blfs-bootscripts. The log files indicated no problems except for the NIC
related stuff, which I eventually sorted out.
If you have enabled MagicSysRQ in your kernel, and your keyboard has
a SysRq key (possibly on PrtScr - labels may differ slightly), you
can probably force a reboot. For my desktops I think I use AltGr
e(right Alt) and PrintScreen - hit the magic key combination for your
keyboard, followed by s (sync), wait briefly, then use the magic key
combination followed by b (boot) or, at the end of the session o
(off). These will do unclean shutdowns, so next boot will fsck, but
the Sync will update logs, particularly the system log and maybe the
mail log, boot log (boot log tends to be not very informative).
If you didn't enable that in your kernel config, wait a few minutes
so that the logs have hopefully sync'd.
None of the above could work, since the keyboard and mouse were powered
off, and the computer hung.
2. Recommendations, now you know how I've got them:
As a first stage, from the host look at the LFS logs to see if there
is anything useful. If there isn't, as root chmod 644
/mnt/lfs/etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail so that you can read and edit it
but it will not automatically run.
If you are able to boot without sendmail, you should have a working
keyboard on several ttys : from one of those, root can try starting
sendmail, or just stepping through the invocation(s) in that
bootscript [ i.e. run commands directly ].
Alternatively, and if you have NOT booted this system in LFS before
you added the extra packages, perhaps you did not build the
(correct) keyboard driver (usb and PS/2 might be different, I'm not
sure).
Following the above advice, and that from another email, I did this:
Fixed the various NIC settings (ifconfig, etc.).
Added all of the CONFIG settings I thought were applicable to the Kernel.
Recompiled the kernel.
Disabled all of the blfs-bootscripts startup scripts.
Magically, a reboot worked and I got a login prompt.
Then I reversed all the disabling, one step at a time, and everything
continued to work.
Finally I installed a bunch more BLFS stuff, X Windows, etc.
Thanks for the help!
Alan
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