Linux installation snags

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 11:31:40AM -0400, Kevin Cozens wrote:
> D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
>> Ubuntu 10.04 LTS came out fairly recently so I've been installing it
>> on boxes for family members that don't like frequent upgrades.
>>
>> I've bump into a number of tricky problems.
>
> Two other problems you may run across are Pulse Audio and Upstart.
>
> Pulse Audio on my machine took a set of audio hardware that worked  
> perfectly under Alsa and broke it. It gives me all kinds of problems now  
> and then with high CPU loads, and/or stuttering audio.
>
> Upstart has changed the boot process to make a machine appear to boot  
> faster. It doesn't seem to follow the concept of runlevels any more. The  
> main problem with that for me is no longer knowing how to boot to  
> runlevel 3 (ie. no X) if I run in to problems with the video card device  
> driver.

runlevel 3 is only no X on redhat (and a few redhat like distributions).
It has never meant that in general.  On Debian style systems there is
no difference between runlevels 2, 3, 4 and 5 at all unless the admin
makes it different.

I would have thought it still followed the runlevels to determine what
to run, just not for what order to do the starts.  That certainly seems
to be what insserv does (which is what Debian is moving to).

> The main problem with the move to Upstart is that it delays running of  
> some processes during startup including the running of fsck. If you have  
> your user partition (ie. /home) on a separate partition from root, your  
> machine can boot and give you the gdm login screen but the system can be  
> (unknown to the person about to login) still running fsck and the user  
> partition may not be mounted. A user tries to login and gets a white  
> screen and the system appears to hang.

That's ridiculous.  Certainly on Debian, rcS still finishes before rc2
is done, even if some things are done in parallel now.  So until fsck
is done and things are mounted, no services will try to run.

> This latter problem is barely acceptable problem for those of us who  
> know our way around a Linux box and can easily recover without having to  
> do another reboot. Its not acceptable for your average user who will  
> wonder why their computer is suddenly broken.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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