Some bugs, where to file them?

[Kyrre Ness Sjobak]

man, 29.11.2004 kl. 22.14 skrev Jeff Spaleta:
> On Mon, 29 Nov 2004 21:49:27 +0100, Kyrre Ness Sjobak
> <kyrre at solution-forge.net> wrote:
> > I have had some difficulties with installing a box with a "RIVA128" gfx
> > card.
> > 
> > The install process itself goes all well. Problems turns up when it has
> > finished installing packages (which took a couple of hours, using NFS...
> > Dead-slow machine...), and reboots.
> > 
> > When it has rebooted, it comes to a point where it says "configuring
> > kernel parametres". And there it stops (i had it hanging there for a
> > weekend, just to be shure. It was still hung when i got back on monday
> > ;)
> 
> did you try manually switching over to vt7 or vt8? 

Yes.

> Are you sure its
> hanging and not just failing to switch over to the X display
> correctly?  You have to be careful... the kernel boot parameters 
> quiet and rhgb  change the level of information you get and where it
> goes.

sure. I tried killing rhgb and single from the line, and it still got
stuck.

> On boots that use quiet and rhgb, the last console text you see before
> switching over to the graphical startup is the kernel parameter line
> as you describe. If there is a problem with rhgb or if there is a
> problem switching over to to the graphical display, you don't
> necessarily expect to see anything else at the console.
> 

I tried to switch back and forth between different vt's. And HD activity
stopped dead.

> And you have to be careful interpreting what happens if firstboot is
> expected to run as well.
> If there is a display problem.. or a problem switching automatically
> to the graphical display.. firstboot could be running..sitting
> there... waiting for input from the user.

It displayed a completely, hung (with a mouse cursor), gray screen.
After switching to vesa.

> And since firstboot runs as
> a script before the mingetty statements in inittab are parsed... its
> difficult to know if the system is really hanging or not... unless you
> attempt to login from a remote machine via ssh or something similar.
>
>

The machine survived firstboot. I was able to switch to vt1 and hit
control-alt-delete, and it rebooted gracefully.

> It's difficult to know if your system really is hanging.. or if there
> is a small problem with the display drivers that is affecting X
> startup for rhgb and firstboot.. without some more information.  Doing
> a fresh install and booting without the boot options quiet and rhgb
> would be interesting... to see if firstboot behaves without running
> rhgb. Similarly doing an install and preventing firstboot from running
> to see if X starts up correctly would be useful.
> 
> -jef

An install takes 2½ hours on this piss-crap machine. It is a 300 (200?)
mhz IBM *APTIVA*. with 182 MB ram. *slow*. You won't know how much time
it took to do an install when it still had 64 MB of RAM. But Anaconda's
X11 gui worked all fine, over NFS and all.

Just face it. It *is* (at least one) bug in there somewhere...

Kyrre Ness Sjøbæk