Help! "Id X is respawning too fast" in YDL 2.3 (?!)

[Cameron Paterson]

Thanks very much for the response. I will get back to you tomorrow with the
results.

CP

> From: Juan Manuel Palacios <jmpalacios@mac.com>
> Reply-To: yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
> Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2002 09:25:33 -0400
> To: yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
> Subject: Re: Help! "Id X is respawning too fast" in YDL 2.3 (?!)
>=20
>=20
> Take it easy my friend, don't despair and don't do anything rash.
> What's happening to you is indeed something very common and fortunately
> very easy to fix, at least at the beginning. No reinstalls, no erasures
> and reformats, no nothing. Just a bit of Linux knowledge. The only thing
> that's happening to you is that you have a misconfigured graphical
> environment and therefore it crashes when init (the startup process)
> tries to switch to runlevel 5 (graphical). But init doesn't give up and
> when it sees that X (the graphical environment) crashed it tries again,
> and again, and again, and again until the kernel realizes it is
> respawning to fast and disables it for five minutes. When they are over,
> the whole dance begins again.
>=20
> So what you have to do is wait for those gracious five minutes and
> enter the console and modify some files. If you are left with a login
> and password prompt at the interim enter "root" and your password. If no
> login prompt then press ctrl-opt-F1 to go to the first console. Login as
> root and then enter "cd /etc/" and hot return (just to make sure, every
> command issued is followed by enter unless said otherwise). Write "pico
> inittab" and go to the part that says:
>=20
> "default:5:......"         or something
>=20
> In any case, is the line exactly below the listing of the five
> runlevels. Change the five to a three and save the changes with ctrl-o
> (hit enter) and then exit with ctrl-x. After that write "init q" at the
> command prompt and the system should go to runlevel 3. If problems still
> persist wait the next gracious five minutes and enter "init 3" (more
> explicit) at the command prompt. In fact, this last command could be the
> first thing issued when you first gain root access to your system, so to
> avoid running against the clock because the nap time is running out.
>=20
> Now, every single time you boot it will be to a text login, you
> wont have a nice graphical environment until you take further steps to
> configure XFree86 (handler of X). But more of that later, first try to
> gain control of your system.
>=20
> Hope that helps. If you have any problem with the solution provided
> please post back with specifics. Regards,...
>=20
>=20
>=20
> Juan.
>=20
> On Wednesday, July 17, 2002, at 06:57  AM, Cameron Paterson wrote:
>=20
>> Hi
>> I recently acquired YDL 2.3 and set about installing it onto a 10
>> gigabyte
>> partition on my nearly-new 600mhz iMac (after first erasing an earlier
>> unsuccessful Mandrake Linux installation on the same partition).
>> I chose the recommended partition scheme (10MB for yaboot, 128MB for
>> swap
>> and max for root). Installation of YDL (with the "Home/ Office" package
>> selected) went smoothly, although I did (perhaps unwisely) force the
>> machine
>> to quit and then restarted the installation a couple of times after I
>> misunderstood a few of the options (assuming previous data would be
>> overwritten/ erased). Once the installation had completed
>> "successfully" I
>> sat back to enjoy my new OS =8B only to run straight into yet another of
>> those
>> headache-inducing cryptic errors in which Linux seems to specialise! The
>> system starts and the boot process continues apparently smoothly until
>> the
>> point (I assume) just before the graphical window manager is about to
>> load.
>> I then get seemingly random flickerings on the monitor, followed by the
>> error message "IT: ID "X" is respawning too fast: disabled for 5
>> minutes",
>> which then just repeats itself, apparently endlessly,
>> every....err...five
>> minutes in between weird flickering.
>> Searching the net, I found a few vague and contradictory references to
>> this
>> apparently known Linux error =8B some vital file has apparently corrupted
>> (perhaps due to the forced restarts) and it may be something to do with
>> Gnome - or so I understand. But all the suggested solutions I found
>> assume
>> in-depth knowledge of Linux which I just don't have (yet). I tried
>> doing a
>> quick reinstall of YDL with the same selections and configurations, but
>> it
>> didn't make any difference....:P
>> I would happily do a  deep level erasure and formatting of the Linux
>> partitions but I don=B9t know how to do this without erasing my 30 gig
>> Mac OS
>> 9 & X (single) partition (Apple's Disk Utility =8B X.1 version =8B does
>> have and
>> 'erase' function but it doesn't seem to be able to see existing
>> non-HFS(+)
>> partitions).
>> Can anyone provide me with a newbie-friendly explanation of this
>> problem and
>> how to solve it? Here's hoping!
>> Cheers!
>> Cameron
>>=20
>> PS - I have just migrated to Yellow Dog after being driven to the point
>> of
>> gibbering despair by the many serious problems which riddle Mandrake
>> Linux
>> for PPC 8.2, so I am very keen to make YDL work!
>>=20
>>=20
>>=20
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>=20
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