This morning, I woke up to wake up my trusty IBM T61 Thinkpad laptop from its short hibernation. The hibernation stalled with a translucent screen: this has happened a few times before in F13's troubled relationship with the laptop so after a while, I tried the trusted Windoze way of hard rebooting the machine (hang on to the power off button, not the command, for dear life). However, unlike other instances, I came back to a black screen with a blinking cursor. This happened a few times I repeated the exercise, so I switched off rhgb and quiet and found that it got stuck after atd was switched on. I tried the Ctrl-Alt-F2 option and logged in as root (all the while, the screen was going back to the blinking cursor and had to brought back so this was a major pain), and then looked at /var/log/messages. Turns out that there was a message there which said something like sealert detected a lxdm-binary leak and was preventing access to a huge name drive. After googling on this, I could not get anywhere, not only that, I can not find a way to do anything. Can anyone suggest anything here?
I have been from FC1 through F13, and Fedora is my only distribution, but even I have to say that F13 was really the worst of the lot. Kernel(!) bug reports on Fedora which I filed religiously -- along with possible quack fixes to help guide to the source of the problem -- went nowhere, in many cases nothing even looked at, beyond assignment, which is so different from my usual Fedora experience. So, I am hoping that we will bury F13 tomorrow and go back to having a great experience with F14 (which I always had, till F13).
Not a rant, but the frustrations of a believer in a great and true OSS product (that is Fedora) which has suddenly lost its sheen for whatever reason I can not fathom.
Best wishes, Ranjan
On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 1:22 PM, Ranjan Maitra maitra@iastate.edu wrote:
After googling on this, I could not get anywhere, not only that, I can not find a way to do anything. Can anyone suggest anything here?
By "huge name" do you mean a UUID? Something like: 8828eacb-11b9-45b8-8558-d2f945c337f6
I wonder if there's a drive/partition/file-system problem? Have your run SMART checks on your drive? Have you run a full fsck on your partitions? What file system are you using?
Also, instead of powering off the laptop, perhaps try magic keys, so that you can sync your file system and put it in a clean state before cutting power.
-c
Hi Chris,
Thanks very much!
On Mon, 1 Nov 2010 21:47:25 -0500 Chris Smart mail@christophersmart.com wrote:
On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 1:22 PM, Ranjan Maitra maitra@iastate.edu wrote:
After googling on this, I could not get anywhere, not only that, I can not find a way to do anything. Can anyone suggest anything here?
By "huge name" do you mean a UUID? Something like: 8828eacb-11b9-45b8-8558-d2f945c337f6
Yes, that is right: but it is too huge to be any use (with all the blinking back and forth)
I wonder if there's a drive/partition/file-system problem? Have your run SMART checks on your drive? Have you run a full fsck on your partitions? What file system are you using?
No, I can try this. I guess this would be in safe mode.
Also, instead of powering off the laptop, perhaps try magic keys, so that you can sync your file system and put it in a clean state before cutting power.
What are these magic keys?
Thanks very much, Ranjan
-c
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On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 2:08 PM, Ranjan Maitra maitra@iastate.edu wrote:
Thanks very much!
No need to thank me, I might not have said anything useful ;-)
No, I can try this. I guess this would be in safe mode.
Yes, "safe mode" or "single user mode" as we call it in *nix world ;-)
At the grub prompt (press esc until it comes up) edit your Fedora line and add "single" to the kernel line. If you've already booted, you might like to edit your grub config (/boot/grub/menu.lst) and set the timeout to something other than zero, perhaps timeout=5.
In single user mode you should be able to do a file system check on your partitions. If you don't know what they are, run the df command before you reboot to see where / is mounted (or grab it from the kernel line in grub's menu.lst).
Something like: fsck /dev/disk/by-uuid/8828eacb-11b9-45b8-8558-d2f945c337f6
As for S.M.A.R.T, you can use palimpsest (gnome disk utility) or the smart command line utility (yum install smartmontools). It might be helpful to check whether the BIOS has S.M.A.R.T turned on.
What are these magic keys?
They're magical ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key
-c
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Chris Smart -
Ranjan Maitra