Hello linuxquestions community. I think as a first time poster with a strange question, some background is in order. I've been an on & off user of Linux since the late 1990s. I know to look first, then post. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've never had to post a linux question before, in spite spending many hours trying to resolve something. This is the strangest thing I've ever seen, so, yeah, I think asking about it was warranted! BEAR WITH ME, THIS WILL TAKE A WHILE...

I've had a socket AM2 file/music server machine since 2006. Started out Fedora...at some point I switched it to Centos 5, then Centos 6. Always running mpd, which I only update every 3 years or so. I'd done various HW upgrades too but finally decided to the biggest one yet, migrating the MB to an Asus M5A97 LE R2.0 I couldn't get the old Audiophile 2496 card to work, and this led me to muck around with various grub boot options, and decide to recompile the whole mpd stack which is a major undertaking. (newest mpd doesn't like the glib that comes with Centos 6 for example) Finally when I got an old firewire/usb PCI card to work, I decided the PCI driving software was probably basically OK, there was just something about the old Audiophile on this MB that was borked, and switched to using the built-in SPDIF. Which has some issues but not necessary to go into here.

THEN I decided I really wanted to get the Asus GS8400 I'd bought a couple years ago really running correctly with Nouveau, w/o setting "nomodeset". I figured for all the money & time I was throwing at this thing, I should be able to also use it as a kind of HTPC. This involved at first trying to recompile libdrm, because I thought something was wrong with it. Then I couldn't get that working, so I removed it (make uninstall) and used rpm & yum to force the reinstall of the default libdrm/x/kdm stack. I still can't get x to start, but that's not even what I'm worried about.

My point in all of this is I've had to do a LOT of mucking around in the past 36 hours, and on a brand new MOBO. That's why this behavior is really, really strange:

The last couple times I booted the machine, several things were odd. The last part of the boot process seemed to slow down more than usual. It took longer to get the machinename: login prompt. When I did enter at the prompt "root", I would hit return and nothing would happen. I would have to hit return again, and then I would get a "Password:" Now, when I entered password, it echoed it! In plain visible text! I am SURE I made no deliberate code/setting change to make that happen. Then, when I got into the shell, this happens: It would take whatever command I entered, and copy just the first letter to a newline, and then return me to a prompt. so if you entered "ls" <CR>, you went to a newline and an "l" appeared, then a newline and back to a command prompt! You couldn't get ANYTHING to run. However, if you Cntl-Alt F2ed into a new shell, that shell behaved normally. After about 30 seconds of this BS, my instinct was to just assume some kind of one-time gremlin and restart the machine. However, when the main shell behaved that way a second time, I got totally freaked out. What would have to happen to 'randomly' make centos start echoing passwords w/o masking? I don't like these new graphical Asus bioses, seems like too many people and software vendors must have their hand in the cookie jar. I suppose a rootkit would try to hide itself better, but, srsly, having the shell not be able to respond? WTF would cause that?

I can later post dmesg etc., whatever people want to do. But for now I've just started running the machine off the emergency backup drive, which is pre- all the modifications I started making to get the new MOBO to run. I want to get an initial list of suggestions before even trying to boot the demonically possessed SSD again.

_________________________________
(5 hours later)

OK...some progress, but there's still a big question mark floating around out there. I spent a further hour researching what could have caused this, then I looked through the scrollback of my putty windows. (btw, this machine is fairly secure, so it's doubtful it was hacked) I keep 2000 lines and use several windows which is always a good idea for tracing what was happening. I noticed that when I tried to reinstall libdrm, the removal of it forced the removal of 41 packages for dependency. However when I loaded kdm again, only 17 packages loaded. One of the missing packages was plymouth. I reinstalled plymouth, and now things are back to normal. Or as normal as they had been. This article is old, but interesting: http://marc.merlins.org/perso/linux/...-To-Linux.html

Still missing plymouth should not cause such a gaping security hole IMHO. I'd hate to do it but I'm on the verge of just trying a clean 6.5 reinstall to fix my other problems, or at least get xorg.conf settings that might make nouveau work with my Asus graphics card.

Feel free to move this thread as appropriate if it shouldn't be in security.

Thing is CentOS is an Enterprise Linux distribution meaning its commonly used in situations one would choose to use RHEL (minus the subscription fees) making good use of the quality assurance, stability, security and release longevity The Upstream Vendor offers. One installs it and that's about it. (Let's leave out mixing trusted 3rd party repo sources like EPEL.) Compiling and installing applications from source or replacing applications or libraries (let alone those that belong to core or subsystems) with unofficial versions or patches or any form of package management that requires the use of "--force" is not only strongly discouraged but it is also not supported for exactly the reasons your handiwork exhibited: deliberately undermining and tainting system integrity and stability. Even when using this Linux distribution and package management as it should be used, adhering to best practices and using common sense should prevail: remember you are your own safety catch.


I'll move it to CentOS.

Hhhhmmmmm. Well I'm sure all of your points are quite valid. That being said, it's not like I was recompiling the kernel here. Yes, I did "muck about" as I repeatedly said, but I don't think rebuilding part of a graphics driver package, deinstalling that recomplication when I realized it wasn't really the problem, then reinstalling it once using rpm and then again with yum to make sure the default version included with the build was OK...should have caused the shell to stop working! If nothing else, it's as simple as yum should have picked up Plymouth as a dependency for kdm.

More generally, and I don't want to seem like a FUDer/troller, but I'm not the only one for whom the advice that "common sense should prevail" is needed. As I said I've been using linux for a long time now. Has it made huge improvements? It has. Are there still things about the way the overall Linux "ecology" works that seem mind-bogglingly idiotic? There are. Without even going into the reasons I chose Centos and the various pros and cons of that, many obvious questions come to mind like, well, why does mpd need more advanced glib libraries for the latest versions? Has something about reading music files and outputting them to devices really changed so radically in the past 5 years? Or did someone just not bother with making it backwards compatible to more conservative distributions? Mind you, I'm not trying to blame anyone for anything per se. I'm just saying that my seeming foolhardiness is only another part of this ecology, of just trying to get something working. (Nevermind the fact that, somehow, this graphics card worked with this linux distro, out of the box on my old Asus motherboard, and refuses to work on the new one. The hardware vendors are obviously not entirely innocent here either. Apparently almost all of the current motherboards that still have PCI slots don't really have PCI slots. There's a cost saving PCIe translator chip that keeps them from having to put all those tedious parallel traces on the board. That might be why my audiophile 2496 no longer works.) Don't get me wrong, I'd still rather have a music server that can run/sleep for months on end w/o needing a reboot every week and megs upon megs of antivirus patches...or buy from a vendor with gold-plated hardware prices and an incredibly smug name for their service counter!

And it shouldn't be any other way. Experimenting on non-Production systems teaches you something by breaking stuff but it also may teach others if you post how to get something to work.

Have you tried another distribution? I'm not saying you won't be able to get CentOS to work, but CentOS isn't exactly a media-oriented distro. Graphics card support, addon audio card support, etc. are things that might seem innocuous but could send a server-oriented distro like CentOS for a loop.

I ABSOLUTELY understand the desire to install a distro and have it just work, with security updates, until YOU decide (not the developers) that it's time to switch to a new one, but this philosophy is kind of at odds with a desktop/htpc audio/video environment where you need to support anything and everything that users might throw into a machine.

As far as media-oriented distros go, I've had great luck with Mint and OpenSUSE. Since I don't really like apt and I REALLY don't like Ubuntu's root/sudo philosophy, I tend to use OpenSUSE on any machine where video/audio support is required (laptops, htpc, etc.), and CentOS on more-or-less headless machines that just need to do a job, and do it continuously without protest until I tell it to stop.

Thanks suicidal. I suppose I should not rule out a change to another distribution. Although it seems like it terms of getting the basics of media correct, all distributions are somewhat converging. I say this because I just noticed I could finally blow away the old alsa.conf file I had from back in 2007 or whatever...the new alsamixer in Centos 6.5 can control the SPDIF output fine w/o it. "Right out of the box".

One issue is I was always taking a different approach to hardware than most people because although it was a home "media" server, originally at least that just meant running mpd headlessly (most of the time) and thus I didn't care about graphics. But funny enough IIRC - and maybe I don't - the reason I switched to centos might have had something to do with fedora's installer not liking the ancient PCI card I was using on an (at the time) relatively advanced AM2 Asus mobo. Maybe it could no longer run in graphics mode or something. I can't be sure, there was some reason I was forced to make that switch and it involved fedora not liking the way I was doing things. Eventually proper name brand PCIe graphics cards got so cheap I just bought one for $30 from amazon. I'm overall happy w/Centos - having to recompile a couple libraries to get the latest media stuff running hasn't been a big hassle. And I've done so many little config tweaks w/o any real CM now. It would be a hassle to switch.
Next hurdle though will be to get WINE running on Centos. That will be interesting.

I like CentOS too. Up until version 7 came out a month ago it was by far my favorite distro for no-questions-asked run-until-the-power-gives-out stability. Version 7, though, is a clusterf*ck, but that's another topic.

On the other hand, I don't like Fedora. Around ~3 years ago it seems like they switched their philosophy from "beta with adequate testing" to "alpha v0.0.0 - f*ck it, let's see if this works". Around version 14-15 stability went through the drain and in my experience the distro has been almost unusable in any serious role since then.

But there is room in between. I consider Fedora and CentOS to be polar opposites. Alpha version alpha versus 10 year old stable and proven. In the middle are distros like Mint LTS, OpenSUSE...even Debian Stable in some regards. Each distro has its place, and while I like CentOS 6 and previous, it would be far from my first choice for a media-oriented application.

If nothing else, you should be able to try them out in a VM to see how your standard programs/libraries stack up.