On Wed, 17 Dec 2003, Andrew Monkhouse wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I recently did a clean install of RedHat 9 onto my system (and run the
> updates), and initially had it booting to runlevel 3. I later changed that
> in inittab to go to runlevel 5. Now when I boot, it stops at the terminal
> login screen until I press enter a few times, then it starts X and goes to
> the graphical login screen.
>
> This is not a case of me being impatient: if I leave it at the terminal
> login screen for a few hours, it will still be there. Then when I press
> enter a few times, it will start X and go to the graphical login screen.
Just one... try turning off the 'firstboot' service. Normally this starts in graphical mode and takes you through some post-install config which isn't critical - you can do it all later. My thinking is somehow it's stuffing up and not flipping to graphics mode since the updates were applied. Yes, it is possible the bug fixes actually create bugs.
Thanks for the suggestion, but firstboot is not running:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] rc.d]# ls */*firstboot*
init.d/firstboot rc1.d/K95firstboot rc3.d/K95firstboot rc5.d/K95firstboot
rc0.d/K95firstboot rc2.d/K95firstboot rc4.d/K95firstboot rc6.d/K95firstboot
Reading the header of firstboot it seems that this only ever runs if you boot into graphical mode on your first ever boot of Linux. Since my initial boot was into text mode, this did not run, and it automagically disabled iteself.
I hadn't looked at what was being run at startup, since it appeared that everything had started up, it was just waiting for keyboard entry before going into graphical mode. But here is a list of what is being run at startup:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] rc.d]# ls rc5.d/S* rc5.d/S05kudzu rc5.d/S56rawdevices rc5.d/S90cups rc5.d/S08iptables rc5.d/S56xinetd rc5.d/S90vmware rc5.d/S10network rc5.d/S70scsi rc5.d/S90xfs rc5.d/S12syslog rc5.d/S80sendmail rc5.d/S91smb rc5.d/S13portmap rc5.d/S80spamassassin rc5.d/S91speedtouch.sh rc5.d/S17keytable rc5.d/S81fetchmail rc5.d/S95atd rc5.d/S20random rc5.d/S85gpm rc5.d/S95hylafax rc5.d/S40smartd rc5.d/S85httpd rc5.d/S99local rc5.d/S55sshd rc5.d/S90crond
Apart from that... you might modify the line in /etc/inittab that starts X to log all output to a file if it's an X problem.
Good idea - I will give that a try.
Another trick I do on servers mainly is move the initialisation of console 2 early in the inittab file.. there's a snip below. This allows you to quickly login as root and watch the rest of the system initialisation. Particularly handy if you've got fun with NFS mounts everywhere and it hangs (or you're too impatient).
# Default runlevel. The runlevels used by RHS are: # 0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this) # 1 - Single user mode # 2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking) # 3 - Full multiuser mode # 4 - unused # 5 - X11 # 6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this) # id:5:initdefault:
# System initialization. si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
# console 2 starts early, remove it from further down this file 2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
l0:0:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 0 l1:1:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 1 l2:2:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 2 l3:3:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 3 l4:4:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 4 l5:5:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 5
Not a bad idea for general use. However in this case it does not appear that any of the individual startup scripts are hanging.
The syslog itself is not showing me anything out of the ordinary. I can see that system initialization finished at 07.02 when it loaded the lucent modem driver for the fax/modem card:
Dec 18 07:02:32 andrewkheng kernel: Loading Lucent Modem Controller driver version 8.26
Dec 18 07:02:32 andrewkheng kernel: Detected Parameters Irq=11 BaseAddress=0xd400 ComAddress=0xd8f8
Dec 18 07:02:32 andrewkheng kernel: Lucent Modem Interface driver version 8.26 (2002-11-04) with SHARE_IRQ enable
d
Dec 18 07:02:32 andrewkheng kernel: ttyLT00 at 0xd400 (irq = 11) is a Lucent Modem
Then there is nothing for 5 minutes until I start getting various cron job outputs and various firewall messages. Then finally these bunch of messages when I log in an hour later:
Dec 18 08:13:04 andrewkheng modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module char-major-226
Dec 18 08:13:04 andrewkheng last message repeated 3 times
Dec 18 08:13:04 andrewkheng kernel: Linux agpgart interface v0.99 (c) Jeff Hartmann
Dec 18 08:13:04 andrewkheng kernel: agpgart: Maximum main memory to use for agp memory: 439M
Dec 18 08:13:04 andrewkheng kernel: agpgart: Detected Intel i850 chipset
Dec 18 08:13:04 andrewkheng kernel: agpgart: AGP aperture is 128M @ 0xe8000000
Dec 18 08:13:16 andrewkheng gdm(pam_unix)[22562]: session opened for user andrewm by (uid=0)
The module "char-major-226" message looks interesting, but this only appears at login (and at every login) not at the time when the X server _should_ be starting. But I will look at that further to see why this is happening. This is at least indicative of some problem with the graphics card I think.
Regards, Andrew
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