Out of memory while booting? update

Charles G Montgomery cgm at physics.utoledo.edu
Tue Apr 7 17:19:29 EDT 2009


You guys are great!  I really appreciate your interest and all the 
comments and suggestions.

A few additional details, in case they might be relevant:

The list of scripts from /etc/init.d (for runlevel 2), which run 
without error from the shell, includes sysklogd, klogd, dbus, 
kerneld, avahi-daemon, ssh, portmap, hal, cron, and kdm.  In 
particular, kdm gave me a login screen, and I could log in without 
trouble.  KDE wasn't usable -- Konsole said it didn't have proper 
access to ttys, and even shutting it down was flaky, but the fact 
that it did as well as it did suggests to me that the problem isn't 
related to the graphics subsystems.

>From the shell, /usr/bin/free and "cat /proc/meminfo" give 
reasonable reports.  Not much of the memory is in use then.  
Previously, my memory was temporarily replaced with a 512M piece, 
and it made no change to the behavior.  I don't know if that tells 
me anything except that some simple problems with my memory can be 
eliminated.

Neither of the two live CDs that failed to boot issued any error 
messages; they just never finished coming up.  They are both 
somewhat Debian-related I guess -- one Knoppix and the other 
Ubuntu, but they should have been using all their own drivers, and 
didn't complain about difficulties getting in touch with the 
hardware.

What I plan to try next is using modprobe from the shell to see if I 
can learn something that way. I'll have to do some poking around to 
figure out which modules get invoked.  I have a list of what ends 
up installed (from lsmod when the system was working), but others 
may get tried and could cause trouble.  It's a stock kernel, with 
all sorts of junk included because somebody might need it.  While I 
have a recent backup of /etc, I don't have one for /boot, so 
looking through the kernel config file isn't easy -- cat and grep 
and such from the shell is all I have available.  Some more study 
of the man pages should be useful.

I'll let you all know if I learn anything interesting.

thanks again   cgm



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