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
More information about the gnhlug-discuss
mailing list