Fedora 9 Beta Live CD: disabling services during interactive startup

[Oisin Feeley]

On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 12:15 AM, Andrew Farris <lordmorgul at gmail.com> wrote:

> > 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.

I don't think it's the keyboard. This machine is a Panasonic Toughbook
CF-Y5.  I just installed Fedora 8 on it with no problems.  The exact
messages are like this one:

Entering interactive startup
+confirm fedora-live
+ '[' -x /usr/bin/rhgb-client ']'
+ /usr/bin/rhgb-client --details=yes
+ :
+ echo -n 'Start service fedora_live (Y)es/(N)o/(C)ontinue? [Y]'
Start service fedora_live (Y)es/(N)o/(C)ontinue? [Y] + read answer
Y

+strstr yY ''
+ '[' yY = yY ''
+ return 0
+ rc=0
+ '[' 0=1 ']'
+ '[' 0=2 ']'
+ set +x

It seems that if I want to stop a service from starting I can enter "N
<enter> N <enter>" but this is not consistent.

The last few services started before the machine either goes to a
blank screen (or a light blue screen) are:

HAL
NetworkManagerDispatcher
firstboot
rhgb-client




> > 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).

Of course.  Thank you.  I can only plead exhaustion due to looking
after a baby for not thinking of those obvious things.  Very helpful
to be reminded of them.

So, I rebooted, hit ESC -> TAB and then added a "3" to the end of the
boot options and everything went very nicely to boot into runlevel 3.
By a mad impulse I then decided to see what happened if I did a
"/sbin/telinit 5".  It worked.  I was able to boot the (appallingly
slow probably due to my 512MB RAM) LiveCD.  I saved off some
information (dmesg and lspci -vv) in case it was useful.  I'm going to
back through the /etc/init.d and /etc/rc.d directories and try and
follow the order of services one by one in order to pinpoint the
differences.

Best wishes,
Oisin Feeley