Taming the Chameleon

Recovering from a bad initrd image

When Linux is booted by the boot loader, it will first load the kernel image (usually /boot/vmlinuz) into memory, followed by the initial boot ramdisk (usually /boot/initrd). If for some reason the initrd image has been corrupted, booting may fail. The following procedure can be used to re-generate the initrd image.

1. Make sure the BIOS is set to boot from the optical drive
2. Insert the OpenSUSE install DVD into the optical drive.
3. Boot the machine
4. Select the menu option “Rescue System”
5. When prompted to login, type “root”
6. Mount the Linux root partition, typically something like “mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt”
7. If the Linux /boot area is on a separate partition, also mount that into the root partition, f.ex. “mount -t ext3 /dev/sda2 /mnt/boot”
8. Bind the rescue system’s /dev to the mounted root filesystem with “mount –bind /dev /mnt/dev” - this will make sure all your device nodes are correct
9. Chroot to the mounted root filesystem with “chroot /mnt”
10. Mount proc and sys: “mount /proc” and “mount /sys”
11. Re-generate initrd image with “mkinitrd”
12. Remove DVD and reboot

Add comment May 11th, 2009

Changing GDM theme in OpenSUSE 11.1

OpenSUSE 11.1 ships with GDM 2.24.x which is a not yet feature-complete rewrite of the original GDM codebase. One consequence of this is that it is no longer possible to customize the login screen using gdmsetup. It is, however, still possible to customize the background image, icon theme and Gtk theme by editing gconf settings.

The properties for GDM are defined in the distribution-specific gconf settings in /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.vendor/%gconf-tree.xml.

To change the background image, look for:

<dir entry=”background”>

…

<entry name=”picture_filename” mtime=”1241629069″ type=”string”>

<stringvalue>/usr/share/backgrounds/glass/glass.xml</stringvalue>

</entry>

…

</dir>

Change the string value to the location of the background image you want to use.  This can be either a JPG file or an XML file in the Gnome background slideshow XML format (which does not seem to be documented).

The icon theme and Gtk theme can be similarly modified by editing the properties “icon_theme” and “gtk_theme” respectively.

Add comment May 11th, 2009