Arch Linux

michael

Member

Registered: 2009-01-23

Posts: 4

Arch i586 boot hangs

Hi,

I just installed Arch i586 onto an old Compaq laptop (96 MB ram, 4 GB hard drive).  The install seemed to go alright, although there were occasional white-on-black error messages over the curses installer that disappeared too fast to read.

Now, when I try to boot, the process hangs with these last lines:

audit: initializing netlink socket (disabled)
type=2000 audit(1276743078.253:1): initialized

I cannot figure out what this means (if anything relevant) or what to do about it.  Any help would be appreciated!

Michael

bzipitidoo

Member

Registered: 2010-01-29

Posts: 33

Re: Arch i586 boot hangs

Could be a Plug and Play issue.  Do you have any more information?

I installed Arch i586 on an old 133 MHz Pentium based netbook with Plug and Play.  The BIOS sets the interrupts for various devices.  But the BIOS doesn't get it right, which in my case causes difficulties with the sound.  A problem like that can easily cause the system to hang instead.  The Windows 98 that came with it works by ignoring the BIOS.  By default, the Linux kernel grabs these BIOS settings and runs with them.  Took a fair bit of fiddling with isapnp=off and trial and error on all the possible combinations of IRQs and DMAs to get sound working correctly in Linux.  You'll find it hard to get help with something like that.  BIOSes with broken Plug and Play are long gone.

michael

Member

Registered: 2009-01-23

Posts: 4

Re: Arch i586 boot hangs

Thanks for the idea.  I will hopefully try it when I get a chance.  I can't give more information or try anything now, unfortunately, because I am away for a while.  I would never have thought of that.