I know that an initial ramdisk contains drivers and modules required for accessing hardware before the root partition can be mounted. If the initial ramdisk is stored on the root partition, then how is it accessed, if the initial ramdisk is required to mount the root partition? Wouldn't statically compiling the drivers required for accessing the root partition defeat the purpose of the initial ramdisk?
View 7 RepliesUsing Linux, when I boot I automatically have 16 16MB ramdisks, however, I would like to create one really large ramdisk to test some software.I found that I can adjust the size of the ramdisks already on the system with the kernel boot parameter ramdisk_size however, this makes all 16 ramdisks (/dev/ram0 - /dev/ram15) the size that is specified. So if I want to create a 1GB ramdisk, I would need 16GB of memory.Basically, I want to create one 10GB ramdisk which would be /dev/ram0. How would I go about doing that? I assume there is a kernel boot parameter, but I just haven't found it.
View 3 Replies View RelatedIs it just me or is Debian Testing having problems with ATI video drivers lately? Whenever I install the drivers from ATI's site, run aticonfig --initial, and restart, they don't seem to work. Whenever I install fglrx drivers, the computer will freeze before gdm boots up.
View 4 Replies View RelatedIm in trouble with my ramdisk, because its to small for my application i want to cross-compile for an embedded system. in fact i have only a precompiled kernel and cant change the settings of the kernel. the kernel is configured for ramdisks with a maximum size of 20MB. i have a montavista toolchain but dont have a montavista distribtion, because its a way too expensive.
So .. the question. i want to try if its possible to use multiple ramdisks for my embedded linux. one ramdisk as root i already have. and the other as partitions or sth. if i start the kernel with exec 0x01600000 -c ".. root=/dev/ram initrd=.." it only boots with the given ramdisk. whre can i apply a second ramdisk to use as extra filesystem to gain more usable space? is this possible?
I use two ramdisks one mounted in /tmp the other mounted as /ramdisk /tmp is used as a temp store for apps which need temp space /ramdisk is used to store copies of read only databases for processing. Files in here can be 10-500Mb in size.
I suspect that the O/S may be caching the files stored in /tmp and /ramdisk and thus is not efficient. How can I check if the O/S is caching ramdisk files and if this is the case how can I prevent it? Is there an option to say 'dont cache /tmp' ?
I just got an hp dv4-2145dx and I am attempting to install ubuntu 9.04. I understand that the maximum number of primary partitions is four. The four on this hard disc are the windows one, a tiny one called hp tools, another tiny one called SYSTEM and then the recovery drive. Does this mean that I will be unable to install linux without deleting one of these partitions? Are they all necessary? deleting any since I don't know what they do.
View 4 Replies View RelatedI m facing a problem while try to upgrade the initial ram disk.
I got the following error:
I am using fc11(32-bit) and i want to boot the system using initial ramdisk by setting the root to /dev/ram in the /etc/grub.conf.c
View 2 Replies View RelatedCompaq Laptop
Celeron Processor
2 megs ram and 1.4gig clock
Downloades and burned umu 10.4 desktop i386
At boot it goes to a purple screen with Ubuntu and five dots changing from white to red. After while it went to a blank screen and would not come out with ctrlA;tF1 or ctrl alt Backspace. had to power cycle to get out.
Had an old Ubuntu 6.10 ISO from a while back and it boots nicely. How to get the ubuntu 10.4 Demo up and running?
Information on the net seems very sparse or outdated for how to go about booting to a RAM disk. I need to be be able to boot a PC without a hard drive in it. I want to be able to PXE boot a PC and supply it with a RAM disk image that also contains the contents of the root file system (obviously stripped down enough to keep the file size small and the boot up time fast).What I have gathered so far is that I need to extract the contents of the initrd.img file, add files as necessary, and repackage the initrd.img file. What I get confused on is how to configure the kernel line parameters to tell it to boot to RAM and not the hard drive and how to go about modifying the init script in the initrd.img to not switch to the hard drive for the root file system. I can't find anything on the net that describes concrete steps on how to go about accomplishing all of this. I'm aware of the existence of Live CD's, but I need to be able to boot the PC without relying on a hard drive, CD, or any other external media. It needs to get all of its contents from the PXE boot server and boot to RAM only. I have the PXE boot side configured successfully. Also, putting the root file system on a NFS share is also out of the question.
View 8 Replies View RelatedI have a user who just got a new laptop and when he connects to the FTP server, it verifies his username and password like it should, but when it goes to do the directory listing, it just kinda sits there. if i refresh the view, the folders show up. wonder if there's something in a log somewhere for vsftp i should be looking at. it could just be his ftp client or air card too, but i want to be thorough on the server too becuase it will help me learn.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI've picked up an HP Simplesave external drive. It comes with some fancy software that is of no use to me because I don't use Windows. Like many current consumer-targeted backup drives, the backup software is actually contained on the drive itself. I'd like to save the drive's initial state so that I can restore it if I decide to sell it.
The backup box itself is somewhat customized: in addition to the hard drive device, it presents a CDROM-like device on /dev/sr0. I gather that the purpose of this cdrom device is to bootstrap via Windows autoplay the backup application which lives on the disk itself. I wouldn't suppose any guarantees about how it does this, so it seems important to preserve the exact state of the disk.
The drive is formatted with a single 500GB NTFS partition. My initial thought was to use dd to dump the disk (/dev/sdb) itself, but this proved impractical, as the resulting file was not sparse. This seemed to be because the NTFS empty space is not filled with zeroes, but with a repeating series of 16 bytes.
I tried gzipping the output of dd. This reduced to the file to a manageable size — the first 18GB was compressed to 81MB, versus 47MB to tarball the contents of the mounted filesystem — but it was very slow on my admittedly somewhat derelict Pentium M processor. The time to do that first 18GB was about 30 minutes.
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I'm running 64 bit ubuntu 11.04, installed off dvd onto dell inspiron 530 if thats helpful.
This is my first attempt at linux ever so i know absolutely NOTHING about it.
I am very new to LVM, as well as not especially experienced at linux, and have some questions about how lvm works. A few months back I set up a server running FC10 and tried creating Logical Groups during the the initial setup. We've realized that we are not using all the available space on the physical drive, and I realized that for some reason (I'm thinking this might have been the default?), we initially created two Logical Groups (VolGroup00 and VolGroup01) and it appears two Logical volumes in each (LogVol00 and LogVol01). LogVol00 in VolGroup00 is mapped to /, and the other Group was actually unused. I figure that it would be simplest to just use all this space mapped to /, so I thought the thing to do would be to simply merge VolGroup01 to VolGroup00. I tried this:
[root@office mapper]# vgmerge VolGroup00 VolGroup01
Logical volumes in "VolGroup01" must be inactive
So after a bit of research, I tried this:
[root@office mapper]# vgchange -a n VolGroup01
Can't deactivate volume group "VolGroup01" with 1 open logical volume(s)
So apparently There's an open volume, but I don't know how to go about closing it. I removed the LogVol00 from that group, but LogVol01 won't budge.
[root@office mapper]# lvremove VolGroup01
Can't remove open logical volume "LogVol01"
So how do I go about closing this Volume? At one point, there was some output that told me LogVol01 was being used as swap space. How do I handle that?
I installed kubuntu few days back. By clicking blindly I lost my desktop - I mean it is working fine but there are no icons on the desktop and there is no task bar with list of programs.
How can I reset to the initial stage when i first installed?
I messed up the first installation of Fedora on my server. My setup is as follows: Fedora and Gnome - NFS system, No dual boot (Windows or anything) Fedora ISO DVD downloaded No kickstart or other tools. how to set this up, from the time I insert the disk and have it boot up (configged already to boot from it). I know how to wipe it clean at intall time. Is that the root directory? And, is /boot the actual boot directory? I'm just having a hard time uderstanding that. As I said, I just want a quick itemized list, step 1, step 2, etc, from partitioning, creating file system, mounting, etc. in the right order.
View 4 Replies View RelatedOS: Debian unstable 32bit, kernel 2.6.32-2, grub 1.98 from late january 2010 (only have working net-access from work now, so I am grabbing information from memory). EXT3 and EXT4 support is compiled into the kernel along with chipset/scsi/sata support (not as modules), and I have tested to boot ext3 with it before proceeding. Prereq: my old disk started to have too much S.M.A.R.T errors, so I bought another one, put in a USB cabinet, added swap and ext4 partition/filesystem to it, and copied over all data from the old system to the new that was mounted at /dest using the command "find ./ -xdev -print0 | cpio -paV0 /dest". Swiched disks, so I now have the ext4 disk sitting at /dev/sda (partitions: sda1 => ext4, sda2 => swap), and booted into rescue-mode from cdrom, using /dev/sda1 as root with a shell on. After doing this, I performed the following commands:
mount --bind /dev /dest/dev
chroot /dest
modified the /etc/default/grub to instruct the kernel to boot using ext4, ran grub-install --recheck /dev/sda
ran update-grub to modify /boot/grub/grub.cfg (which looks as it should) After doing this, grub finds my partition and mounts it. It however stalls with the message: "warning: unable to open an initial console" and does nothing after this point. I have no ramdisk, but my old kernel booted fine from ext3 (and still does if I copy it to a ext3 partition), and since the ext4 support is compiled into the kernel - should I really need a ramdisk?
my Setup is Fedora 14 x64 + radeon hd 4830 i've downloaded .run package from ati site with latest driver for x64 systems. installed it, but didn't edited grub.conf becouse i didn't understood anything there (probably didn't spent enough time to get things understand) Now i've lost possibility to enter my Fedora system. during boot it lost it's modern blue boot screen (with filling drop), it was replaced by standard old boot screen with triple-color stripe. after this boot screen monitor start blinking going on and off. and on last step i'm getting "Fedora 14 boot bla bla bla something" on screen. nothing works except Ctrl+Alt+Delete. system reboots showing successful daemons shutting sequence. How can i edit grub menu from initial grub screen is it possible to it's own 'e' option or 'c' from grub command line?
View 4 Replies View RelatedI accidentally promoted my initial account to admin and now I want to revert it but I don't remember the specific initial user privileges.So there are 2 questions:
1) First, is it safe to "downgrade" the account, logging in with another one? In general what's the best way to do it?
2) Could someone enter Administration->Users and Groups->[select initial account]->
Advanced Settings->User Privileges and list the privileges that are on by default?
I repeat I want the privileges of the initial account, which I suspect are above those of basic users (that are added later) and below admin...
I'm trying to install the latest release of Ubuntu from the official site, 10.10.
I downloaded the 64-bit edition first to install. After burning it to a CD, it launches in my PC just fine and lets me go through the install process. I'm letting Ubuntu use up the whole HDD, so no special options are being chosen during the install. At the end of the installation, it asks me to restart and I hit OK, it closes out of the box and leaves me looking at the default background... forever.
Thinking I did something wrong, I tried again, but this time left the box to download updates and install 3-rd party software unchecked. Same thing as above, it appeared to install just fine but hung after I tell it to reboot.
Lastly, I downloaded the 32 bit edition to try, and it gives me the same error.
If I hard restart my machine after waiting on the background image for a while, it will not boot when it comes back up. My PC just remains at a screen after the BIOS acting like it's searching for bootable media.
I'll be honest that I haven't waited for over 15 minutes for it to restart. But should it really take that long?
Uptill today, my computer was dual-boot Debian Lenny with an upgraded kernel and Windows 7 Home Premium. My laptop has two hard drives, HDA and HDB. Windows was on HDA (original install from computer purchase), while my Debian partitions were on HDB. I used Grub for the dual-boot, and both OSes worked just fine. Then today I decided I wanted to kick Win7 for good. So I made a backup image (just in case), booted Slackware 13.1, used CFdisk to wipe HDA (which Windows did NOT make easy to do), then installed Slackware on HDA (there's a reason why I wanted both, but thats irrelevant to the question). After the install, I put Slackware's LILO bootloader on HDA (where GRUB was before I wiped the drive for Slackware), manually configured it to load the bootable partitions for Slackware and Debian, and restarted.
First, I went into Slackware. and Slackware works just fine. Then after I was done in there, I rebooted and went into Debian. This is where the trouble started. When I had Windows on HDA, Debian booted just fine, didn't even start in CLI, went straight into KDE. Normal install in every way. Now, after adding Slackware, it loads up its initial boot and goes into a CLI. I can do the regular CLI stuff, like navigating directories and logging into user and root. But typing startx just gives a bunch of errors saying that X can't start. How the Slackware install could have affected Debian in this way.
ive just ported another system over to CentOS however when I went to run the initial set of updates using the graphical tool it asked me after downloading if I wanted to import a new public key which I dont remember ever being asked this before? Is this right or has there been a problem with my downloads?
View 1 Replies View RelatedI am configuring a new installation of CentOS 5.4 with the goal of setting up a server. Ive been through the installation and set up everything that I thought that I had to setup. Im getting into CentOS because my work utilizes this distribution. I do have some debian experience, and I have used Ubuntu on both server and desktop platforms.
Now, when setting up Ubuntu, I found that I was able to get networking up much easier. During the initial installation it had asked me to choose between DHCP or manual configuration. As this is going to be a server I want it setup with a static IP. But for some reason no matter what I do I can not get the machine connected. I go so far as trying to do a 'yum update' and I can not make a connection.
A few things Ive noticed that might be applicable here . . . . .
For DNS servers, I am unsure exactly what I need to put here. My ISP is Cox. I am not sure what NS's to put there for them, so I thought that I would be able to use third party DNS servers such as OpenDNS or the Google Public DNS. I know that I have setup my debian server like that with no issues. Also when setting up my debian server it prepopulated certain areas that I am required to fill when setting up CentOS. Example, when setting up localhost.localdomain -- I would choose my hostname and local domain was prepopulated as ph.cox.net. I dont know if this is something that I have to use, or if it would change if I am using third party DNS.
My resolv.conf file looks like this
search ph.cox.net
nameserver (IP address of third party dns either opendns or google)
nameserver (IP address of third party dns either opendns or google)
The main pages for logsave say that it is useful for saving the output of boot scripts before /var/log is mounted because the output is saved in memory until it can be written out. but there is now example of this.
How and where do you add the logsave command to save all the text that flashes by at boot time can be saved where you can read it cut and paste error message to forms etc.
I'm trying to work with Xen for the first time,if I mess up some of the lingo here or if I don't quite make sense. I've been running openSUSE 11.2 since it first was released, and after an initial problem with my video driver, its been working great. I tried to install Xen today, and after the install appeared to complete successfully, it asked me to reboot and boot into the Xen kernel. When I did this, although the system booted up to the command line, it didn't launch KDE. When I try to start KDE manually it tells me that it "Can't connect to X server".
This seems to be roughly the same problem I had when I first installed openSUSE but I can't for the life of me remember how in god's name I fixed it.
I keep having issues at the main password screen. The computer starts, I click my login name, type password, start to hear the music, screen distorted, then reboot. Sometimes I have to do this up to 20 times before it finally logs in.
I am running a Biostar U8668-D Motherboard with 1gb ram. Video is onboard. I am not sure what type. I think it may be S3 Pro Savage.
I am trying to install Lucid on my Alienware M17x laptop.I loaded the install to my thumb drive and boot to my thumb drive but after the initial option screen, I see nothing. If I choose to run Ubuntu from the thumb drive, the screen goes blank and after a few seconds I hear the sound, but no Ubuntu on my screen.Am I missing some unspoken prep steps?
--My System------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Processor(s)Processor- 1CPU_Name- Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9600 @ 2.80GHz
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We are brand new to the Linux platform and just learning. So this is what we have done so far, Installed RHEL 5 on a test machine. Says it was succesfully installed. But when it boots it boots to a blank screen with no prompt or gui or anything just a black screen. Does not accept any input or anything.
We are able to get into the GNU Grub and this is what we see
I can enter b for boot
We would like for this to boot to a GUI interface.
We want to set this up as a simple file server.
I am trying to install Fedora 11 on my HP Desktop (Intel P4 2.8 GHz) machine with 1.25 GB memory. It has 265 MB nVidia graphics card (6800 series).
When I try to install from boot from the DVD, it prompts to boot (in 10 secs). However after it boots all I get is a blank screen. I suspect this has something to do with the X display initialization with respect to the graphics card I have.
I had faced similar issue with other distros before (Ubuntu) but could manage to boot with some specific boot parameters for specifying x display driver settings at boot (vesa).
I recall Fedora has similar settings like xdisplay=vesa. But unfortunately this doesn't work.
My internet connection is pretty fast, but the initial connection to websites take about 4-10 seconds. Sometimes I even get a "connection timed out" error. Once and if the connection is made, the website loads up pretty quickly. I have no problems with internet speed otherwise as I get pretty good speeds for downloads and torrents.
Chrome shows "sending request" and Firefox shows "looking up" during this period of apparent inactivity.
It is not a DNS problem as I have switched DNS from my default to the OpenDNS servers. Besides, everything works fine on Windows with either DNS setup.
I have also tried switching off ipv6 by adding "alias net-pf-10 off" in modprobe.conf. I even switched off ipv6 in Firefox in about:config to no avail.
Oddly, wget seems to work fast and normally. And nslookup returns results almost instantly.
I am on Arch linux with a Broadcom wireless card.