From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020529 Description of problem: I made a error during installation of the xfree stuff. So my machine was not able to start XFree after installation when running firstboot. I rebooted single user and read the comments at the start of /etc/rc.d/init.d/firstboot telling, that firstboot will not start if the file /etc/sysconfig/firstboot exists. I created this file with "touch /etc/sysconfig/firstboot" and rebooted. But still firstboot is trying to start X. Please change something, so that there is an easy way to stop firstboot. -OR- make firstboot run without a proper X configuration by falling back to VGA? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install 2. Make a wrong X configuration 3. crash Actual Results: Machine freezing because of incorrect XFree configuration used by firstboot to start X Expected Results: No X at all or fall back to VGA Additional info:
Ok, there are a couple of issues here. One is that you need an easy way of making firstboot not run. One way to do this is to boot into runlevel 3. I have changed firstboot today to only start in runlevel 5. Another way is to run 'chkconfig --del firstboot'. That will prevent firstboot from ever trying to start again. Another is to create /etc/sysconfig/firstboot with the contents: RUN_FIRSTBOOT=NO. I know the comments in the Python said something diffrent, but they were wrong but I fixed them a few minutes ago. Another is to have firstboot have a way to recover from a busted X configuration. I'm working on this but I may not get it done in time for this release. I added some code today that will make firstboot call redhat-config-xfree86 if /etc/X11/XF86Config file does not exist, which helps some. But, this doesn't handle the case of when /etc/X11/XF86Config file exists but is damaged so that the X server can't start correctly.
But your original bug report is that firstboot doesn't read /etc/sysconfig/firstboot. It does, but it expects to find "RUN_FIRSTBOOT=NO". Therefore I am closing the bug as Rawhide. The Docs group is working on better documentation for this file.