Other Help Topics :: X not automatically starting after a remaster



Greetings DSLerers,

A little back story - if you don't mind. If you do, skip to the last two paragaphs. I am a vim addict, and it use it almost exclusively for my university programming courses. However, the Uni runs an ancient version of SunOS, and a very old version of Vim that cannot handle my lovingly crafted .vimrc file. Plus, the student servers are always topped out at 100% memory usage and most of their swap. So even over an intranet ssh connection things are painstakingly slow.

Previously - I was running Ubuntu Dapper on a borrowed laptop. Just for vim, javac and gcc. Then the laptop died, and was taken away for repairs. But I figured a bootable DSL cd would work just as well. The only catch was there is no .dsl package for the JDK. And even if there was, it's a bit too big to fid on my ancient and aging flash drive (which I've never replaced because I mainly work with text files, which I can just ssh around).

So I did a complete remaster using instructions printed elsewhere on this forum. And it worked. Kind of. While booting it now complains that it cannot stat /KNOPPIX/.bash_profile, and then a little later it just drops me into a root shell.

'su dsl && startx' will load up Fluxbox at this point, but without my menus.

Using the 'dsl xsetup' cheat code does the same thing. However, after su-ing to dsl and running 'startx' I get the X setup wizard, which upon completion loads my complete desktop, menus and all. From this point on the CD works like a dream. The sun JDK works perfectly, as does vim6.3 with my custom setup and plugins. All in all, I'm a happy camper, but I would very much like to know why X is not starting on its own anymore.

Also - the shutdown and reboot menu items no longer work. This seems to be because /sbin is not in my path. I'm sure that's easy enough to work around - but I'd rather know why this happened and fix the problem, rather than messily butcher a config file to work around it.

I did change .xinitrx - I switched from Torsmo to Conky... and then after I couldn't get rid of the blinking - even with double bugger - back to Torsmo.

Any idea what I did wrong? Happy to post up logs and contents of any file you need to see - just not sure where to start.

Cheers,
Nequeo, It sounds like /KNOPPIX/.bash_profile is missing from your remaster.  Are you sure you followed the directions from the last page of meo's remastering topic?  It has a line that copies that file into the directory for the remaster.  As far as I can tell from what you've said that looks like your problem.

You could check that out by doing an ls -a /KNOPPIX/ from your remaster and seeing if that file made it into your remaster.

Your remaster sounds very interesting.  I hope you can find what's wrong.  I know when I do my remastering, I use a re-writable CD so I could try it a few times to get it right.  Then I copy that CD to a write once CD when I get it right.  I never get it right the first few times.
Hi Clacker,

I followed the instructions on that post to the word - and  definately typed cp -rP /KNOPPIX/.bash_profile /hda3/tmp/newcd/KNOPPIX

Which *should* have done the trick, no? But I, too, find it curious that it couldn't stat the file during boot. I was thinking maybe I screwed up something in the .xinitrc. But on your advice I will double-check to make sure .bash_profile is there. Will have to wait until tonight to check it, but I'll let you know how it goes.

I actually did use a rewriteable for the first burn... But the PCs at Uni have a conniption if you try to boot them off a CD-RW, and what I had was close enough that I can use it at Uni tonight.

Thanks for the help so far,

Cheers.
Nequeo, I don't know how you set yours up, so I may be wrong about this, but when I do it I have a source and a newcd directory.  The .bash_profile gets put into the source/KNOPPIX directory (the one you use create_compressed_fs on), not the newcd/KNOPPIX directory.  Perhaps that's the error you're seeing?
Quote (clacker @ April 03 2006,19:45)
Nequeo, I don't know how you set yours up, so I may be wrong about this, but when I do it I have a source and a newcd directory.  The .bash_profile gets put into the source/KNOPPIX directory (the one you use create_compressed_fs on), not the newcd/KNOPPIX directory.  Perhaps that's the error you're seeing?

You got it in one. Added that file and it all works brilliantly now. Thanks for the help.
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