BlueOnyx

Posted on February 26th, 2009

I have decided to follow the (*) BlueOnyx distribution, as it picks up where BlueQuartz was trailing off. It is no 5106R as opposed to 5100R, and retains the sausalito / cce configuration tools.

Customary to practice, I never try a new system out on a production server, so in this case I opted to install it on a spare HDD in an older laptop while I performed some testing.

Since the machine may become disconnected from the network after the install, making it impossible to reach the familiar ‘/login’ url from another client, I have occaissionally opted to install a basic X environment on BlueQuartz, not good for production performance, but great for doing all in one testing, and development on a stand-alone server, lets say =)

There are some new features in BlueOnyx, so I couldn’t wait to tryout my fresh install. The install was great, and you now have the following options for install:

– 20GB LVM partition layout
self – manual partition config
small – 10GB LVM installation layout

It is also possible to run ‘linux rescue’ … as I found out:

in order to install X + GNOME on BlueQuartz, I did (as root)

yum update
yum grouplist
yum groupinstall “X Window System” “GNOME Desktop Environment”

this failed in BlueOnyx, something about ‘dependancy libxxxx.0.so’ so I tried X + KDE instead, which appeared to install successfully. To my horror though, I got the dreaded Kernel Panic on reboot.

The solution for me was to ‘boot linux’ to enter the rescue mode, and

# cd /mnt/sysimage/etc/selinux
# vi config
edit the line “SELINUX=enforcing” into “SELINUX=permissive”, save and
# exit
to reboot into the system. (I suggest you simply edit /etc/selinux/config after installing X, but before rebooting, to spare yourself from having to use the rescue system)

This way, instead of


unmounting old /dev
unmounting old /proc
unmounting old /sys
audit(1235663670.224:2): enforcing=1 old_enforcing=0 auid=4294967295 ses=4294967295
Unable to load SELinux Policy. Machine is in enforcing mode. Halting now.
Kernel panic – not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

you get

unmounting old /sys
INIT: version 2.86 booting

=D