Fedora 9 Beta Live CD: disabling services during interactive startup

Andrew Farris lordmorgul at gmail.com
Wed Apr 9 04:15:08 UTC 2008


Oisin Feeley wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> The i686 FedoraDesktop LiveCD appears to fail somewhere after
> NetworkManagerDispatcher is started. The exact symptoms are that the
> screen flickers, goes blank and the CD drive continues to spin for
> minutes and then becomes inactive. Keyboard or touchpad input results
> in the CD drive spinning up again but the screen remaining blank.
> 
> Attempts to see what's going on by switching to some other console via
> Alt-Ctl-Fx appear to be ignored.
> 
> Attempts to selectively disable services (with the object of disabling
> NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher) are a problem because the
> reading of the options appears to ignored. The prompt "<service name>
> (C)ontinue/(Y)es/(N)o" (or something of that form) appears, but it's
> necessary to enter at least two carriage-returns with the option, a
> bit of what appears to be Python code for reading the option and
> starting the services is printed and then the service is (possibly)
> started anyway.

Do these messages look like something is wrong with your keyboard input?  Do you 
have a typical US layout keyboard or something else?  That sounds very much like 
garbage is getting sent to the script rather than understandable bytes, and its 
going 'oh crap' when it cannot find a Y or N.

> So, any ideas as to how I can get a bit further with testing the
> pre-release? Or capturing better info for reporting whatever is going
> wrong to bugzilla?

You can boot the machine to runlevel 1 or 3 by editing the syslinux boot menu 
before it starts the automatic boot.  That should let you disable NetworkManager 
or NetworkManagerDispatcher to see if those are the culprits.  You can also 
adjust/edit X configuration from there if necessary before starting gdm to login 
(in runlevel 5).

Push TAB while looking at the boot menu, then add a '1' or '3' at the end of the 
kernel parameters and push enter.  You can do anything from those runlevels that 
a typical installed machine would allow you to do, mounting a flash drive to 
copy off debug logs for instance.

-- 
Andrew Farris <lordmorgul at gmail.com> www.lordmorgul.net
  gpg 0x8300BF29 fingerprint 071D FFE0 4CBC 13FC 7DEB  5BD5 5F89 8E1B 8300 BF29




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list