Weirdness with Fedora/XP upgrade
Beartooth
Beartooth at swva.net
Mon May 26 21:25:25 UTC 2008
On Mon, 26 May 2008 13:36:37 -0400, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
[...]
>> Vesa driver? I've seen the word during boot-ups on at least one
>> machine; but since it means nothing to me, I don't even recall which
>> machine. I'll be glad to try that or anything else I can; how do I do
>> it?
>
> I believe you can do this:
>
> When you see the GRUB splash screen on boot, press a key.
Did that -- and nothing happened.
The machine was still where it had been, saying it had started
the network manager. I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, and it went down as far as
sending the TERM signal -- and then sat there, without doing anything I
could see, but with the machine's light still on.
I hit the reset button. It went as far as the grub menu, and I
hit a key. That left it with its F9 line highlighted. I hit e -- and
nothing happened. In fact, it didn't respond to anything on the keyboard
-- the first time I've ever seen grub do that.
I hit the reset button again, and this time it let me tell it to
edit both times. Then it froze again.
> Select
> the top kernel line of the options offered and type 'e', select
> the kernel line and type 'e'. Append 'video=vesa' at the end of
> the line. Type [Enter], type 'b'.
I hit the reset button yet again, and did all the above hastily
(but, I hope and believe, accurately) -- getting it all in ahead of
another freeze.
> Then X should detect your video card as vesa, which is the most generic
> sort of interface.
It booted, but only into another login line, white on black; I
logged in -- and it gave me my prompt, along with a line saying "Can't
open display."
> If the machine boots, you can boot in runlevel 3 (edit the kernel line
> in GRUB as above, but instead of "video=vesa" add "3". Then you'll get
> a virtual console to log into. Then (as root) run
>
> system-config-display --reconfig
>
> and see if that helps.
It tried some sort of traceback, said something cryptic about
/usr/share/system-config-display/xconf.py, and (apparently) tried to
import something from somewhere. Then it said
ImportError: No module named ibmasm
and gave me my root prompt back.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the scp -r that I was running quit
with the message
scp: error: unexpected filename: ..
lost connection
So there must be some stuff I didn't get; I don't know what, but
I got vast amounts -- enough to run my df up, despite deleting hand over
fist, from its original 50% to 78%. (Baobab, which sees only a 35.2 GB
drive, makes it 72.8%. I'm pretty sure this machine has a nominal 40 GB
drive; I thought the #1 machine had two -- 40 GB for Fedora and 40 GB for
XP, just because the one thing I do on it is GPS-compatible topo maps,
which are apt to be graphic-intensive and to grow hugely -- but it may be
80 and 80.)
The actual numbers on machine #2 are
[btth at hbsk ~]$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
36693560 26814088 7985484 78% /
/dev/sda1 194442 18754 165649 11% /boot
tmpfs 501108 48 501060 1% /dev/shm
The corresponding top line numbers from df on #1 are
73545144 30178956 39570016
Since I haven't even tried to salvage anything from anywhere but
my user's home directory, it looks to me like I have very nearly all of
it. (I don't keep financial or otherwise critical files on any computer.)
Bottom line: I'll gladly keep this up so long as you, Patrick
O'Callaghan in the X thread, or any other clearly knowledgeable person
here thinks it worth while. Hey, we might uncover the anaconda bug! But
if the worse comes to the worst, I'm confident I can now live with the
results of wiping the hard drive and re-installing F8 from scratch.
--
Beartooth Staffwright, PhD, Neo-Redneck Linux Convert
Remember I know precious little of what I am talking about.
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