Bob McGowan writes:
> During startup, /etc/inittab uses the /etc/init.d/rc script to run the
> various scripts in the rc?.d directories. It has a commented out line for
> debugging. If you uncomment it, from what I can see, it will tell you what
> it's doing. It looks like this will propagate to the scripts that it runs,
> so you may expect to see a lot of stuff printed during boot.
This turns out to be an extremely useful thing to know.
What actually happens, however, is the script doesn't execute
the starts and stops but echoes what it would have done. You can
run it that way even after the system is fully booted. You just
call it and supply the runlevel number as the first argument to
get some idea of what it is thinking. Of course, it works
perfectly every time and calls all existing scripts in the right
order.
What I don't have is a log of any rc2.d activity. I
think it all goes to the screen very fast. As a computer user
who happens to be blind, this isn't much use, but these things
usually go too fast for anybody to read.
On some UNIX systems, such messages as "Starting secure
shell," etc, are logged as the daemons fire up. On this system,
/etc/init.d/ssh does, in fact, echo such a message but that's
one of the 2 scripts I can't get to start during boot. Something
is still happening to those 2 scripts when the sequence reaches
them and there is no log trace anywhere as to what it was.
As I originally said, Oralux is a KNOPPIX distribution
but can be installed as Debian on the hard disk.
Can anybody think of any way to add enough verbosity to
the logging of the boot process to try to trap what is not
happening?
The other interesting thing I have noticed about this
system is that it doesn't log any ALSA messages about what sound
card is in use, etc. The sound does appear to be in working
order as aplay and the speech synthesizer both work (not at the
same time because of the sound card.)
When I usually install Linux, I use a serial console.
That is not an option as there are no native serial ports on
this system. I need every screen message to go to a file
somewhere and that may tell me something new.
I think when I finally fix the problem, I will have
learned a lot, but I've been about 2 minutes from solving it for
the last 5 days.:-)
Martin McCormick
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