SUMMARY:Headless Linux

["Christian J. Miller" <Chris@TCLC.org>]

Hi Folks,

The results are in.  I got lot of advice.

I was advised to prevent apmd from starting, but it turned out that my
hang was in the kernel, not the daemon.  And some of this was my
confusion since I clearly talked about apmd in my original question and
that was totally wrong.

I was advised to jumper some pins on the PS/2 adapter to fake a
keyboard.  It turned out that a mouse had the same electrical behavior
as a keyboard so I thought I could use a mouse to fake a key board, but
the system was smart enough to recognize that my mouse was a mouse and
not a keyboard so I decided that a jumper would not have any better luck
and went no farther.

I got some suggestions that the motherboard had an apm BIOS and that was
the beginning of the solution.

Although I still can't tell you why the presence of the keyboard is
important to the apm module of the kernel, or the lack of a keyboard
causes the BIOS to express an intractable state to the apm module, I did
learn that I could turn the apm module off.  I added "apm=off" to the
appropriate line in grub.conf.

Thank you for those who corresponded -- you know who you are and I thank
you for your help.

Now, can anybody tell me how to find the complete list of parameters
that can appear on that line in grub,conf?  :-)

Chris.

Life is a journey, not a destination ...



Included for your convenience:

Hi Folks,

Over the weekend I succeeded installing RedHat Linux 8.0 on a headless
Dell box using the serial interface as console.  Had some problems and
solved some problems.  Insight available for the asking.  :-)

Disk space is cheap, so I select all available packages.  Operationally,
I have discovered that the boot sequence hangs after the apmd console
message appears on the serial console output and before I see the
expected kswapd console message:

        apm: BIOS version 1.2 Flags 0x03 (Driver version 1.16)
        -----------  <== Hangs here.
        Starting kswapd

I have learned that plugging in a keyboard is sufficient to avoid this
hang.

I'm aware that there are BIOS diagnostics that will cause a hang under
some circumstances when no keyboard is present but I don't believe that
such is my problem because I am well past BIOS initialization and I am
into RedHat boot sequence.  Are there any ideas why the lack of keyboard
causes this headless installation to hang on boot?  More importantly,
are there any ideas how to eliminate this hang?

Thanks for the help.

Chris.

Life is a journey, not a destination ...

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