Replies interspersed below. At 02:31 PM 1/17/00 -0500, alex galloway wrote [in part]: >the alt-F1 alt-F3 alt-F4 and alt-F5 commands still work fine. >but on the main page (alt-F1) it says this: >install exited abnormally -- received signal 9 Ah yes ... Red Hat keeps alive the Linux tradition of installers exiting with helpful, informative error messages. >sending termination signals...done >sending kill signals...done >unmounting filesystems... > /tmp/rhimage > /mnt/proc > /mnt/ > /proc >you may safely reboot your system > >and this happened after about 30 minutes into the install process, during >the installation of the dev-2.7.7-1 package. anyone know what a "signal 9" is? "man signals" for info on this. signal 9, though, is SIGKILL, the most familiar signal of all (it's the same one used in "kill -9"). The program received an unconditional kill signal from somewhere. >the reason why i suspect that it has something to do with the swap space on >my drive is that if i hit alt-F4 the last line before the crash says this: ><6> adding swap: 16596k swap-space (priority -1) This suggests two possibilities to me. One, creation of the swap partition failed. If during the earlier disk-partitioning step, the RH installer gives you the option to do a bad-block scan on the swap partition, do it and see if it turns anything up. Two, your memory plus swap are too small. The old rule of thumb on swap space was to have twice as much swap as real RAM. While that's not as important on new, large-memory systems, yours, at 16 megs, is the size that this rule was made for. So try a larger swap partition (32 megs). > >bwt... i haven't rebooted since the crash... so all the info is still in >front of me. > >do you suggest that i reboot? will i reboot into DOS, or into some crippled >form of linux? Well, you don't really say how you've partitioned the hard disk. If you made it all Linux partitions, then DOS is gone, and booting from the hard disk will most likely fail. You'll need to boot from floppy. Your only choices at this point are to reboot or to read what is on the screens (or to power down) -- the system won't let you do anything else. >about the swap space..when i set up the swap partition, i made it of type >"linux swap" and assigned 16mgs to it (since my machine only has 15mgs RAM, >i figured that that would be enough). although if it tried to add 16596k >should i increase my swap to 17mgs?! 16596K = 16 M (that is, 16596 is the power of 2 that is closest to 16000, and K and M in the computer world usually measure powers of two, not true thousands and millions). But as I said above, you probably want 32 M of swap space. ------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"--- Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------
