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Irritating problem.

This is on a Gentoo box (all up to date). I emerge'd Gnome so I could give it a go instead of fluxbox (call me mad...), and I also emerged famd and added it to default runlevel using rc-update. When I emerged Gnome it also grabbed a whole load of other things, 87 to be precise. Now for some reason it will go through the normal boot procedure, Set up GDM and then it hangs. I don't know what it's hanging on, all I know is that it is after GDM. I've got parallel service startup on for speed(could that be a problem?). Having an extra 87 packages potentially causing problems doesn't help the situation much either.

I've also got a "mountsamba" script there which isn't working too, which I am intending to remove (since it's useless as my net mounter does the same thing).

Currently I've loaded the LiveCD and chroot'ed into the install to check it out and change things to make it boot. But I'm not sure where to start. I've looked at /var/log/messages, which doesn't seem to help much, and also dmesg.

I'm not really sure where to start with this, could anyone share some logic with me? I can get network access with the LiveCD, but I imagine posting things is going to be real hassle (unless someone can come up with an easy way to post logs and stuff with links2 only....)

Cheers!

In /var/log, you have several log files to look into: such as boot.msg (on suse, anyhow), localmessages, and others. Since it's hanging on boot, I'd look at the boot.msg file first.

I appear not to have a boot.msg file. What I do have is:

Code:

Xorg.0.log      cups  emerge.log  lastlog  news  sandbox          wtmp

Xorg.0.log.old  dmesg  gdm        messages  samba  scrollkeeper.log

messages doesn't seem to help, lastlog isn't ASCII data, news is blank, gdm has a bunch of files in it...

Code:

:0.log :0.log.1 :0.log.2 :0.log.3 :0.log.4

None of which tells me anything other than GDM is using defaults because there isn't a config file, when I first installed GDM. Emerge.log is saying things about idesk-extras, which is what I emerge'd before starting gnome.

Hmmm....

Since GDM is the graphical login daemon, can you start in a runlevel that omits it? Can you start up interactively?

How would I do that? Sorry, I'm a bit of a newbie, I know how to change runlevels after boot but I don't know how to boot into a specific runlevel.
BTW, this is what a rc-update show gives me:

Code:



          alsasound | boot

                apmd |

              autofs |

            bootmisc | boot

            checkfs | boot

          checkroot | boot

              clock | boot

        consolefont | boot

        crypto-loop |

              cupsd |

                dbus |

          domainname | boot default

              esound |

                famd |      default

      foldingathome |      default

                gift |

            gkrellmd |

                gpm |

                hald |

              hdparm |      default

                hlds |

            hostname | boot

            hotplug |

              ivman |

            keymaps | boot

              local |      default nonetwork

          localmount | boot

            modules | boot

          mountsamba | boot

            net.eth0 |      default

              net.lo | boot

            netmount |      default

                nscd |

                ntpd |      default

            numlock |

            nvclock |

            portmap |

          rmnologin | boot

              rsyncd |

              samba | boot default

              spamd |

              splash |

                sshd |

            svnserve |

          syslog-ng |      default

            urandom | boot

          vixie-cron |      default

                xdm |      default

Oh and BTW, I'm running the LiveCD chrooted into my installation to do all this with sshd running so I can copy paste things here. Just to save any confusion.

OK, I figured out what was going on. It was my netmounter. The problem was, since I had paralell startup, the prompt for the password was getting discarded while a load of other services started. Even though there is no password, this made it stall (presumabley netmounter needed to finish before it progressed to the next runlevel).

Now I need to find out how to have the password ( "" in this case) saved somewhere so I don't get prompted for it. Otherwise I won't be able to use paralell startup, which speeds things up considerabley.

For future reference, where would I have found the Password: prompt?

Cheers!

PS: Now that's sorted my /home isn't getting mounted (it should be mount /dev/hda2 /home). I can't figure out why that is happening either....