[PLUG] Linux Mint 17.x machine brought to its knees after debauchery on my part
Damon Getsman
damo.gets at gmail.com
Tue Feb 3 16:54:53 UTC 2015
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So I ended up taking up a friend on his recommendation that I
give Linux Mint a try. I believe the version that I'm using is 17,
with cinnamon (originally). Unfortunately, it's on a machine that was
too limited on memory for the standard desktop environment and
virtualized servers that I was primarily running it for. So I ended up
going on a google search for the way that Mint handled runlevels, and
modification thereof, so that I could remove the splash screen (I like
seeing my debugging @ boot output, by god) and boot into console-only
mode, saving the overhead of all X processes. I mean, seriously,
there's always good old 'startx' when needed. I got all of these things
working after removing a handful of scripts from the /etc/rc runlevel
directories, and switched to a much lower footprint/resource hog of a
window manager for when I did need to go into X.
The first problem that I noticed is that maybe I shouldn't have
removed so many boot-up scripts. Even when I did go back into the
standard Mint window manager, it was immediately complaining at me that
hardware acceleration was disabled, and yes, there was a performance
hit both on graphics responsiveness and on the CPU in general when the
window manager was active. Not sure which script I need to reinstall
to get that working again, and I ended up without a list of the ones
that I removed due to not working with appropriate attention to detail
when I was seriously sleep deprived.
This is where things start to get really interesting. After
loading my new window manager, at some point I was unable to spawn
another shell. A new gnome terminal or xterm simply would not spawn
anything. The windows' text was the same color as the background for
some reason, and I was unable to see output. Sleep deprivation made me
forget that I could highlight it in order to see it. *insert Picard
facepalm meme here*
Eventually that desktop window got closed and I was unable to
spawn another shell to replace it. The xterm/gnome-terminal window
would pop up, but then close, without me able to see any input.
Attempting a console login was another version of the same. I
was able to switch to a terminal, get my username and password
validated, and see the login header and motd, but then the machine
would die (presumably upon attempting to spawn the shell). I made the
mistake of rebooting it to try to fix this. Whoopsie. No logins means
no more information. I guess I didn't have much of a chance at that
point, though, because of all of my login shells had perished, even via
remote.
Does anybody have a list of standard runlevel 3 startup scripts
that I might be able to look at, or know where I might find one? Also,
if anybody has any other tips on this I'd greatly appreciate it. I
know that I can boot from a rescue if I need to and snag my virtual
machines and other data, but I really don't want to have to install
over from scratch. Then again, I always have been about a more minimal
installation, and Mint was way too much for me, especially on that
machine. Maybe dropping back to debian is a good idea. I don't know.
I'm open to anything y'all might have for me.
Thanks for your time and consideration.
-Damon Getsman
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