I tried installing Milestone 3 (KDE LiveCD) on my laptop last night and it failed 2 times during the “Copying Disk Image” step. The whole system locks up, including the Cap and Num Lock lights flashing.
I got Milestone 2 installed before, and before I started I checked the md5sum to make sure they matched.
Should I report this as a bug? Is there a place I can get more information from the failure? I did manage to to copy down everything I could see on the screen though it doesn’t say much.
My Gnome LiveCD version should be downloaded by now at home and I can throw it onto my USB stick and try installing it over the weekend, or do you think this will happen there as well?
I’ve never really done testing or much bug reporting before so I am trying to learn the most effective course of action.
dragonbite wrote:
> I tried installing Milestone 3 (KDE LiveCD) on my laptop last night and
> it failed 2 times during the “Copying Disk Image” step. The whole
> system locks up, including the Cap and Num Lock lights flashing.
That is a kernel panic.
> I got Milestone 2 installed before, and before I started I checked the
> md5sum to make sure they matched.
Did you check the medium after you burned it?
> Should I report this as a bug? Is there a place I can get more
> information from the failure? I did manage to to copy down everything I
> could see on the screen though it doesn’t say much.
With this kind of panic failure, there is not much information logged.
When running normal X, there should be a dump on console 10 that you
can view with CTRL/ALT/F10. As long as the medium is OK and it happens
regularly, you could start the copy and then switch to console 10.
Incidentally, you get back to X Windows with CTRL/ALT/F7.
>
> My Gnome LiveCD version should be downloaded by now at home and I can
> throw it onto my USB stick and try installing it over the weekend, or do
> you think this will happen there as well?
Hard to tell.
> I’ve never really done testing or much bug reporting before so I am
> trying to learn the most effective course of action.
You picked a difficult one to start with. I have done a lot of kernel
debugging - the kernel panics are the toughest.
Larry
The medium isn’t on a CD, it is on a USB stick I installed via UNetbootin. I’ll check next chance I get to see if there is a check medium option at bootup. Otherwise, the check was on the .ISO file that I installed on the usb stick from.
Since it gets all the way past partitioning and into copying the image I should have time to switch to ttyl F10 via Ctrl+Alt+F10 and see if anything shows up there.
Thanks. I’ll try this and then try it with the Gnome version instead, just in case.
Ok, I tried the Ctrl+Alt+F10 view once the installation started only one message came up after the process started
[831.940510]Kernel panic - not syncing : Attempted to kill init!
So I downloaded and tried the Gnome version. Checked the md5sum and it matched, threw it onto a usb stick with UNetbootin and gave it a whirl.
It got to where it was trying to start X and I could see the spinning system busy circle. Then it blanks out, and tries again, and again, and again, and … well you get the idea.
It continues to loop until I Ctrl+Alt+Fn to any other one and then I hear the startup music but nothing. I see nothing on the screen and it doesn’t matter which one I am looking at. I cannot change to any of the other ones either.
I could try burning it onto a CD and try installing either one of the versions (KDE or Gnome) from the CD?
How often does the build change? I could try downloading again and see if its been updated at all with something that may have fixed it?
I could try Milestone 2 and try upgrading from that (not sure how to upgrade from that in the first place)?
Any suggestions on how to proceed from here?
dragonbite wrote:
>
> Any suggestions on how to proceed from here?
I could trace the fault back only a little. As the message states, the
system is trying to kill “init”, process #1 that starts all other
processes. When that happens, the system can only crash.
I would try burning one of those two onto a physical CD to see if that
changes anything. I don’t expect it to work, but we need a test.
The kernel is not likely to change very much as it is using the
release version of 2.6.30. It will change when 2.6.30.1 comes out, but
that may take a while.
I’m downloading the CD to see if I can duplicate your problem.