[YLUG] Update fedora 10

[mike cloaked]

On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 8:18 PM, Patrick Dupre <pd520 at york.ac.uk> wrote:
> Hi Mike,
>

>> prevent it from running? Or when the X crash happened did you then
>> login as root to tty1 without X and try to force startx? This sounds
>> like you never did get firstboot to run?  Please confirm.  If this is
>> the case how did you create the non-root user(s)?
>
> You are right, I guess that I did never run firstboot.
> How I do it now ?

Well you may be able to change the parameters in the file
/etc/sysconfig/firstboot and reboot. (i.e. make it say YES and not NO)
- however see below as I believe you may have messed up your user area
so that a login screen may be either corrupt or impossible to load.

i.e. I suspect that you have more problems than just not running firstboot.

> Right now, I only log in root, but I created manually an user
> (editing passwd). The result of startx is similar.

You cannot add a user by editing passwd alone - there are a series of
coupled sets of parameters that need to be modified in files in /etc
when a user is added - you need lines in passwd, group, shadow and
gshadow and unless you know what you are doing I would suggest you do
not do it that way at all - and in addition you need the correct set
of starting files in the user area in /home/your-user-name  so the
proper way to do this is to run as root the appropriate command to
create a new user:
useradd -c "Full Name" your-user

where Full Name is whatever name you like the user to have, and the
login name is what you choose as your-user,
then once the system has created the new user then do as root
passwd your-user
and set a password.

This will properly set up the new user area and the appropriate set of
login files.

I don't know at what stage or how you added the nomodeset parameter
but be warned that trying many different approaches may alter the
system files such that the system breaks and possibly in ways that are
difficult to diagnose unless someone who knows what they are doing is
able to login and investigate.  However it is very important to relate
everything that was done along the way to the point where you found
the system did not work.  If you leave information out about what you
did that may have broken something then others who are unaware of what
you did not report may then not give you appropriate advice.

It is possible that by trying to create a new user the wrong way then
the login manager will break sufficiently that you then cannot get the
login manager to give you anything on the screen and it is possible
that this is the main cause of your inability to get a screen display
rather than any issue with X.  However at the point where your install
did not properly complete you had an incomplete system - and without
knowing exactly what else you did might screw the system up enough
that remote diagnosis becomes impossible.

Certainly simply editing /etc/passwd will mess up your system and gdm
may not now know how to handle the broken user area .... if you kept a
copy of the original /etc/passwd I would suggest you reinstate it.
You also need to have the correct permissions on that file and also
the correct security context (for SElinux). If you broke any of those
then you are likely not to have gsm give you a login screen.

I am now unsure whether by trying to revert your broken user files
will actually get you running again - playing with system files as
root when you don't understand the system is gonig to lead you into
trouble and quite possibly break your system irrespective of any
problems with X.


-- 
mike