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

Sat Jul 20 14:16:01 2002

Juan

Thanks very much for your detailed reply to my YDL installation problem the
other day. I appreciate you taking the time. I actually got two responses -
someone else suggested running Xconfigurator from the prompt and since that
seemed to offer at least the possibility of an immediate solution, I though=
t
I'd try that. And it worked - at least it did after I selected 'failsafe'
option. However, I have immediately run into another series of problems. If
you can shed any light on the following fubars in a newbie-friendly way, I
would be very grateful:-

1/ Firstly I have no sound, just static when I log in as a regular user. I
get an "Sound Server Informational Message" saying that there has been an
error initialising the sound driver because:-

"dev/dsp can't be opened
No such device"

When I log in as root, I get no error message but no sound either. I have
tried setting sound server to 8-bit as suggested on the YDL support site,
but this does not make any discernible difference. Force quitting X and the=
n
rebooting back into KDE seems to temporarily bitch-slap the sound server
into life for a while but the loud distorting static is still present and
the orchestral start-up chime disappears again later.
I thought I might try downloading any available updates for 2.3, thinking
these might solve the problem, only to run into problem number two....

2/ The (dialup internal) modem doesn't work (properly). I ran the internet
configuration tool thingy and then entered my settings into KPPP, but this
insisted that it couldn't find my modem. After search of the archives of
this very mailing list, I realised that KPPP was looking for the modem at
/dev/modem and not where the configuration thingy was showing it - at
/dev/ttyS0. Although I have no idea why this is the case, I altered KPPP's
settings to /dev/ttySO and for a blessed moment it looked as though this ha=
d
solved the problem. KPPP now found the modem and seemed to successfully dia=
l
it and log onto the network. However, when I attempted to then access
webpages in both Konqueror and Mozilla, both browsers refused to work,
displaying error messages about every site I tried being an "unknown host" =
.

3/ And finally, none of my screen savers work. When they are supposed to
kick in after the set interval, I just get a black screen. Pressing the
'setup' and 'test' buttons produces no result. Is this some sort of X serve=
r
- graphics accleration fubar?

Cheers=20

Cameron Paterson

PS - My hardware is graphite 600mhz iMac with CDRW drive

> 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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>> yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
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>=20
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