root programs

[Stryker]

bah, i'm stumped again. i read up and it seems like pam.conf is optional, u can keep everything in /etc/pam.d. I copied my /etc/pam.d from my fedora partition and it still doesnt work so i dont think i'm missing anything.

edit:
an intresting note. I run it as root, and it works fine. But I made a new consolehelper program set to run xterm as a regular user, i ran it as root and xterm opened up as root. The same program doesn't open up for any user except root. It gives an "unknown error"

[Void Main]

Yeah, to me it definitely sounds like a PAM issue. I'm no expert in PAM and it's always been somewhat of a magical black box to me but I do understand the very basics of it. When I get home I'll try and dig into it a little deeper. Problem is, all machines at my house have working PAM and consolehelper installations. I need a scratch system withouth all that stuff so I can get where you are. :)

[Stryker]

if u want i can make an iso for u of my main parition. i've been up all night trying to figure this out, i've not been stumped for this long in a while. You'd be the first person to have another copy of my almost finished distro

[Void Main]

How much disk space are you using up? I'm running a little low but I could surely find something to clean up. I would be willing to download it and see what I can do (could just bring it up in VMware).

[Stryker]

i'd probably strip out a few big stuff (like open office and source code for all the stuff), i'm guessing about 600mb for a filesystem.iso.bz2. I'll post back after i make it with a size

[Stryker]

about 580mb. It's uploading now, im on cable with 256k upload so it may be a while, i need a nap anyways. i'll post back a download link when its all done.

[Stryker]

I finally got it up. http://calyptos.com/isos/filesystem.tar.bz2 It's 555mb. I took a lot of stuff out to make it smaller for you, but nothing should be essential or affect pam or consolehelper. Sorry it's not an iso like i said, slipped my mind at the time. I set the root password to "linux", just in case that's necessary (although its not). What i'm trying to do is run packager, /usr/bin/packager which should run /usr/sbin/packager as root.

[Void Main]

I thought you were going to do a dd image dump of the parition, in which case I could have just booted the image file directly. I didn't realize until after I downloaded it that it was a tar.bz2 (I just wget'ed the shortcut without even really looking at it). I suppose I could create an image file, format it ext3 (what file system are you running?), mount it and then extract the filesystem to it and boot it, of course I would have to run LILO on it (or GRUb or whatever boot loader you use). Unless you have other suggestions. How big do I need to create the image file for the extrated file system?

[Stryker]

a dd image dump would make a huge file, the parition is like 60gb. I thought just tarring the important files would save u some space, u mentioned having a problem there. And I didn't want to include the 6gb /root directory full of source code and stuff, nor the 1gb /home directory filled with my crap. I'm running a reiserfs filesystem. I use grub, the stuff u'd need for booting it are in the /boot/grub/grub.conf file (what kernel i use, the initrd file and such). Extracted it was about 1.4 gb or so i think, but i'd shoot for 2gb just to be safe.

[Void Main]

I have created a 2GB reiserfs DAT file and extracted your file system to it with 146MB to spare. Only problem is your /boot is a symlink to /system/boot which appears to reside on another partition. Can you tar up your /system/boot and make it available for download?

[Stryker]

no problem, sorry about that. also if u plan on starting X u gotta start xfs manually (didnt add a startup script for it yet)

I got the boot folder at http://calyptos.com/boot.tar.bz2 i'd recommend un-symlinking that one. The way I have it set up is that most of the / folders are hidden and in order to hide /boot i had to mount it in /system/boot and sym link it cuz u can't hide mounted folders, but u can hide sym links. so the only folders are /home and /system (and /system/software /system/configuration and stuff).

[Stryker]

i'm not to sure its pam related anymore. I copied all the pam configuration stuff from a few other distributions all with the same result. i thought about getting another program that uses pam but i couldn't think of any small ones.

[Void Main]

Ok, I give up, I can't get your OS booted. I first realized that I can't use the kernel you sent me because I am trying to boot it on an AMD K6-2 and I'm guessing you have it compiled for something higher than that as it just reboots the system when I try and boot it. No problem I thought, I'll just use my Fedora kernel. Of course I have to build a new initrd with reiserfs support since I put your file system on a reiserfs partition. I can get it to boot through everything up to where it should pass control off to init and it just hangs.

So I wiped the partition, created an ext3 partition and put your file system on it. Went to a very stock Fedora kernel and initrd that I already use on my Fedora installation. Same results, hangs right where it should be starting init. Of course I had to create a /initrd directory and create a /dev along with all the devices, still sticks right where it should be loading init. I tried sticking the Fedora init and startup files on the partition with same results. I would have expected it to work as you are running slightly different GLIB versions but I was just hoping to get an error message or something. Nothing. What am I missing? I feel like a n00b. :) Time to RTFM the Linux boot/init process again I guess.

[Tux]

Could I suggest a kernel recompile?

[Void Main]

I'm already running a kernel that supports my processor (one of the Fedora kernels). Now if Stryker would like to recompile a kernel for me with his compiler and options and send it over along with the modules I would be more than happy to try it but this is turning out to be a lot more than just figuring out how to get usermode working.