Slackware 12.2 installation problem
 

While trying to install Slackware 12.2 onto an HP nw9440 Portable Workstation (laptop), running into weird problem - setup gets to loading software - usually just after installing GutenPrint and system shuts down and won't restart until power and battery are pulled and replaced - then system will boot up.
No errors indicated when booting with installation media - original problem occurred when using downloaded ISO of the DVD installation media - but problem occurs whether using DVD or CD ISOs burned myself or DVD media delivered through Slackware subscription.

Laptop had Slackware 12.1 installed in dual boot config with Win XP Pro and worked fine. Tried to perform new install into same partitions as before, but formatted partitions to be sure I was starting fresh.
I have used both the CD ISOs and the professional DVD to install Slackware 12.2 on other hardware without any issue, so it appears as though it must be something to do with the power/battery/charging circuits of the laptop. I have run HP's online diags to verify that the hardware is working properly.

I also attempted to perform the setup process using a SAMBA share in case there were some sort of conflict between the hard disk and the optical drive - system still shuts down about the same place and won't boot again until power and battery are removed then restored.

Does anyone know of any process that could affect the power that would be running during the normal setup process?

The problem is caused by the gutenprint package.
The gutenprint "doinst.sh" script which runs after the package content has been installed, will be busy for some time generating compressed PPD files (PostScript Printer Description files). If your system is not so powerful, this can amount to a lot of time! Apparently some computers switch off during the process, others don't and I have not yet seen a good explanation why.

Usually, waiting is all you can do, perhaps press the CTRL key from time to time - because regular keypresses is what two people reported as keeping the computer from shutting down.

When preparing Slackware 12.2 the decision was made to let the doinst.sh script create these PPD files instead of adding the PPD's to the gutenprint package. Having them all in the package will increase the package size with 45 MB ... and space was an issue when creating the 6 ISO images for Slackware 12.2.

In hindsight, adding the 45 MB extra disk space may have been the better alternative, but during testing there were zero complaints about this package.

Eric

Thanks Eric
 

Thanks Eric

I'll try to do the install this weekend and exclude GutenPrint. If the install works, I can add GutenPrint using the packagetool utils.
The laptop I'm installing onto is Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM - have never had a performance issue before this.

Thanks for your insight.

Terry

had same problem installing to an older machine., got 12.2 to install by not installing gutenprint during the initial installation

I had the same issue. My hdd stopped but monitor remained on. I pressed the up and down keys and enter a couple of times I guess that might have inadvertently saved me. I got a PIII 866 with 512mb of RAM so it took a while to get through that part.

Patience is the key I guess.

I have seen this also be the problem with some processors / ACPI chipsets in the sense that the laptop is used to some software running to tell it how to throttle (read: cpufreq for linux). I saw my buddy's mac consistently die in any linux live media after about 2 minutes. The closest thing I got to troubleshooting (due to how fast it locks to protect itself from overheating) was to note in lsmod that cpufreq was NOT loaded. I couldn't load it fast enough.

I would think that alienBOB is probably right, and I'm probably not, but it's a possibility. See if you can skip installing gutenprint. If not, it might become necessary to do some rather ugly hacks. One that could be used, I would think, is mount cdrom to /var/log/mount right before "setup" comment, then install the hugesmp.s modules to root (since you're basically running in a ramdisk, if I remember correctly), then see if you can force modprobe to load the cpufreq for your laptop. If this is Pentium-M or later, it's probably acpi-cpufreq and cpureq-conservative that you want to load, then tell it to go to conservative scheduling (echo conservative > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor on single processors; don't know what it would be on dual core). Don't know if this can be done, or if it will help, but I thought I'd throw it out there in case this is a halt due to CPU temperature.

Some (sort of) problem here.

Trying a ' full ' installation on an old Celeron 800 Mhz ( 325 Mb ram ) and the setup stalls on the Gutenprint thingy....

It's not a laptop, and it's not 'contaminated' with any fancy power management except for the power switch :) so I do keep a visual, but nothing seems to happen. Just a blinking cursus in the lower left corner of the setup screen and nothin happens.. CD-rom spins down ( stops ) so the pc is nice and quiet, but just sits there.

Will try to be patient and wait a little longer before I finally pull the plug ( again ).
Where in all those options is Gutenprint located? I mean: If i would try it again, and without Gutenprint,.. ( so i can try it later with the pkgtool ),. but there's like a million options,..

The gutenprint package is in the "ap" series.
And yes, it can cause a considerable wait-time on slow machines because this package's post-install script generates roughly 65 MB of compressed PPD files.
You can see what happens if you wait a bit longer, and hit a CTRL key from time to time to prevent a shutdown which some people reported.

Eric

And yes, Patience, my friends. It did the trick just to walk away,.. cup-o-coffee and voila... it's through.

Personal solution: Don't wait or stare at the screen during setup. Just walk away and come back later to see the cd-tray ejected.

Same problem here. Installation on an old PII laptop seemed to hang at gutenprint installation. I killed the setup process and restarted it, but then, strangely enough, slack could no longer detect my CD drive! I thought the drive had finally died.

I restarted the machine, and my CD-ROM was recognized properly, but gutenprint seemed to hang again. I left to ask about the problem here, and when I checked back, it was installing Python. Phew.

Why would this happen? Was the drive locked somehow, and remained locked when I killed the setup process? Wouldn't setup report, then, that the drive was in use or something, instead of acting like it didn't exist? I ask only out of curiosity, as patience solved my problem. :)

K-Man

Hi kmurphy,

Yep, the install always hangs a bit on gutenprint. It did that for me as well on my four Slackware boxes. Yeah, you just need to wait and it gets done.

But do you know why, after killing the setup process and restarting it, Slackware would no longer recognize the CD-ROM? Seemed strange to me.

K-Man

Define recognize. I would imagine that, since it's mounted at /var/log/mount, it probably wouldn't let you use /dev/hda or whatever it is, since that's busy.

And why are we resurrecting old threads?

very good ! now I study

The hangin' CD-rom player is something I did notice to.. Did work on an older machine, so figured the CD-rom had died on me..

Didn't mention this before since I kinda forgot about this 'feature'; thought it was a hardware failure.. And didn't want to but put down with the answer: "fix your hardware, it ain't slackware that causes your freeze"



PS: old threads never die. Atleast: not the usefull ones.