ramblings of a {sys,net}admin…

A few days ago, I decided to install Fedora 7 on a Dell Dimension 4600 that I had sitting around doing nothing. The installation files are on a network server and PXE booting is set up to allow me to start a Fedora 7 installation without the need for installation disks.

I fired up the installation, went through the prompts, set everything how I wanted it and fired it off. I came back 15 minutes or so later, clicked the “Reboot” button and let the box start up. I wasn’t paying attention to it while it restarted, but when I looked back at the screen I noticed I was staring at the gdm login screen — but I shouldn’t have been. After the initial installation completed and the system restarted I should have been looking at firstboot.

Having ran into issues with firstboot before, I knew that there should be a logfile at /tmp/firstboot-crash.log, and there was:

[root@jefferson ~]# cat /tmp/firstboot-crash.log Traceback (most recent call last): File “/usr/sbin/firstboot”, line 111, in firstbootWindow(fb) File “/usr/share/firstboot/firstbootWindow.py”, line 150, in init self.loadModules() File “/usr/share/firstboot/firstbootWindow.py”, line 426, in loadModules loaded = imputil.imp.load_module(module, found[0], found[1], found[2]) File “/usr/share/firstboot/modules/timezone.py”, line 32, in import scdMainWindow File “/usr/share/system-config-date/scdMainWindow.py”, line 23, in import gtk.glade ImportError: No module named glade [root@jefferson ~]#

That’s weird, the pygtk stuff should have been installed during the installation. I rebooted the box, fired up the installation again, and left all settings at their defaults and let anaconda do its thing. Once it was done, the system restarted and I ran into the exact same problem.

This time I decided to figure out exactly what was wrong. I decided to verify all the installed files. “rpm –verify –all” returned, among other things, “Unsatisfied dependencies for system-config-securitylevel-1.7.0-1.fc7.i386: pygtk2-libglade”. Okay, there we go. After figuring that out, it was a simple matter of running “yum install pygtk2-libglade”, letting it install from the Internet and rebooting. Upon reboot, firstboot started up like it should have and then the system was fine.

I still don’t know what caused it, as the installation “media” is obviously good. The files on the network server have been verified and have worked for numerous other installations and the problem only showed up on this particular Dell PC. Oh well, problem solved!