[ug-bosug] System Rescue

[USM Bish]

On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 10:46 AM, Moinak Ghosh <moinakg at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 8:34 AM, USM Bish <bish at airtelmail.in> wrote:
>> Just needed some help, in case somebody can guide me. I had a fully
>> functional SXDE running in a multiboot laptop. This laptop has an Intel
>> High Definition Audio, for which there  is support only in OSS ver 4 and
>> beyond. I did a pkgadd of the binary from opensound currently marked
>> as stable, and did an osstest immediately after installation. I did get
>> sound from the speakers. I was quite happy with the output in terms
>> of quality.
>>
>> I rebooted the system (as recommended), and Lo ! I started getting
>> error messages on the re-boot. Scrolled past too fast to appreciate
>> the details. It went on to the gdm bootup process and I got the log-in
>> screen. I have only two users on the box, self and root, and I cannot
>> log-in as either. After entering authentications details it recurses back
>> to the login screen. Unlike linux, I cannot go to a console with Ctrl-Alt-Fn,
>> and investigate. Stuck ! I cannot do a normal shutdown, only power down !
>
>   You should be able to do a normal shutdown just by pressing the
>   power button once. Solaris will detect that and do a graceful shutdown.
>

Thanks Moinak. This is actually what happened. I did press the "power"
buttin, and solaris did a regular shutdown. What I meant by the term
"normal shutdown" was software controlled shutdown.

>>
>> I could boot into the "failsafe" option, but then, that leads me to a
>> root prompt, with the full system mounted at /a. I cannot replicate
>> the error which is causing the boot failure. Probably this is some
>> kind of IRQ conflict (I cannot imagine anything else which can go
>> wrong after OSS install).
>>
>> How do I proceed from here ?
>
>   You need to boot into Single-user mode. in GRUB screen select the
>   boot entry and press 'e'. Now select the "kernel ..." line, scroll to the
>   end and add ' -s'. Press ENTER and 'b' to boot.
>
>   You will get down to your familiar single-user console login prompt.
>   You can also see what errors are being spewed on the screen.
>

Thats a solid clue. Thanks. Will get at this when I get back home from
work. Will come back with the results of this exercise.

Googling around I came across this reference. It seems I am not alone
with this type of problem ... We need to find the issue. Is it the kernel ?
Is it an OSS issue ? Or is it gnome ?

http://de.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=58624&tstart=0

My wifi has gone kaput after this episode, and nwam is not being able
to churn out its "auto-magic" !

Bish