[Leaplist] The InstallFest: Post Mortem

[William H. Ferguson]

I attended the InstallFest yesterday to seek help in curing the "Greeter
Application crashing"  loop;.

Patrick immediately volunteered to help me out. But Phil had said he'd
sit with me and show me how to effect a fix. So I thanked Patrick for
his kind offer and sat down to wait for Phil to arrive.

During previous messages I had sent to Leaplist, Phil Barnett and John
Simpson had both tried to guide me into a solution. Becasue of their
Leaplist e-mail forum help, I had managed to stop the "Greeter" loop by
changing to the /etc directory and using "nano inittab" to keep the
Computer from trying to start an X Window session----a GUI interface.
But the next step stumped me. Phil advised me to press  "Alt-X" to carry
on with the "fix."  It wouldn't work on my Fedora  core 8 machine.

So, before I had come to InstallFest, that much had happened.

Later in the afternoon Phil Barnett and John Simpson arrived at nearly
the same time.

Phil immediately sat down at my computer and started working on the
problem. Neither of these gentlemen had ever seen my computer, had no
knowledge of the files on it, etc. Phil  typed so many commands so fast
that needless to say I couldn't follow, much less remember, what was
happening on the Screen.

Pretty soon another attendee needed help more pressingly and Phil went
to help him. He was gone a while so I asked John Simpson if he would
help me and carry on.

Graciously, John then sat down at my machine and explained what he was
doing on the stdin - stndout. He issued many commands and I couldn't
follow all of them mostly due to my complete lack of previous
familiarity with most of the commands.

I would ask occasional questions and was quite impressed when John would
answer them in a manner which I could grasp, and, also, occasionally
he'd reply:  "I don't know." No pretense of any kind, just solid
knowledge and experience with Linux.

Before long John became suspicious of whether I had much space
left on the computer's Hard Drive. He ran "df -k" and then "du -hs" on
slected files and found that there were a couple of programs which had
used 14 GB of hard drive space.

He soon isolated the problem to the fact that I had created the same
BACK-UP, 13-14 GB in size,  on both a USB-connected External Hard Drive
and on my Computer's Hard Drive. Both BACK-UPs had been stored on the
Computer's Hard Drive. One in my /home directory and another in
Filesystem's  /mnt directory. 

It looks like I had intended to use the "cp -r" command and store the
BACK-UP on the USB-connected External Hard Drive but had mis-directed
the BACK-UP to the Computer's Hard Drive. 

Then I somehow had typed the same "cp -r" command but forgot that I had
disconnected the USB-connected External Hard Drive.

When the presence of these  two space-eating identical BACK-UPS became
apparent, John suggested that I delete one of them to free up Hard Disk
space. This we did and immediately rebooted.

At John's direction, at the Command Line, I  typed "cd /etc"
then typed "pwd" to be sure where I was; then type "nano inittab"
scrolled down to the line which showed the computer was operating
at Level 3 and changed that line so that the computer would operate at
Level 5 again-----that is---enable the computer to again enable the GUI.
Now he explained that when making one's exit from "nano" and saving the
changes, the   "^"   (carat) symbol before each of many options listed
in "nano" meant press "Ctrl."  The command may be different in other Op.
Systems.

Back here at home, the old Dell computer now rocks along again just
fine.

Many thanks to Phil, and especially  many thanks to John Simpson.

William
(P.S. John is the man who straightened me out on how to Partition my new
Computer running Fedora core 9 on my first visit to InstallFest a couple
months ago)


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