Bitcurator 1.8.0 booting to terminal

[Lachlan Glanville]

Hi all,

I've installed a Bitcurator 1.8.0 partition on a desktop running Windows 7. Rather than booting the environment, it's booting to a terminal. I'm a linux neophyte, have tried sudo start lightdm but am told connection refused. Any idea where to go with this?

Thanks

[Matthew Farrell]

Hi Lachlan - 

I'm running into similar behavior on a dual boot machine running Windows 7/BitCurator 1.7.98.

While I haven't found a permanent solution, it seems to be that the linux partition mounts as a read-only filesystem. From the command line, running sudo mount -o remount,rw '/path/to/linux/partition' / has remounted the filesystem as read/write and launched the BitCurator GUI. In my case, the path to the linux partition is /dev/sda6. 

Like I said, not sure why the BitCurator side is booting this way, but this seems to work for now.

best,

farrell

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[Timothy Walsh]

Hi all,

We're running into the same problem here with a new dedicated machine. Remounting from the terminal using the command Farrell described doesn't seem to work. I'm going to have a sysadmin look at it tomorrow and will report back if we get anywhere.

Best,
Tim

On Monday, April 3, 2017 at 9:36:11 AM UTC-4, Matthew Farrell wrote:

Hi Lachlan - 

I'm running into similar behavior on a dual boot machine running Windows 7/BitCurator 1.7.98.

While I haven't found a permanent solution, it seems to be that the linux partition mounts as a read-only filesystem. From the command line, running sudo mount -o remount,rw '/path/to/linux/partition' / has remounted the filesystem as read/write and launched the BitCurator GUI. In my case, the path to the linux partition is /dev/sda6. 

Like I said, not sure why the BitCurator side is booting this way, but this seems to work for now.

best,

farrell

On Mon, Apr 3, 2017 at 2:17 AM, Lachlan Glanville <lachlang...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

I've installed a Bitcurator 1.8.0 partition on a desktop running Windows 7. Rather than booting the environment, it's booting to a terminal. I'm a linux neophyte, have tried sudo start lightdm but am told connection refused. Any idea where to go with this?

Thanks

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[Tracy P.]

Hi All,

Chiming in with instance of Bitcurator booting to the terminal. I've also followed the command as Farrell directs below (modifying for my local /dev/sda of course). No luck on my end either.

Thanks,
Tracy Popp

[Timothy Walsh]

Hi everyone,

In order to get our dedicated installs working, one of our sysadmins disabled the rbfstab application with the terminal command "sudo rbfstab -r". This prevents the booting to the terminal issue by preventing the fstab file from being overwritten at boot, but comes with a tradeoff: it disables the software write blocking in BitCurator. At CCA we always use hardware write blockers so we decided this was an acceptable tradeoff, but it's definitely something to be aware of.

Cheers,

Tim

[Kelly Bolding]

Hi all,

I just wanted to report that we are experiencing the same problem when setting up BitCurator on a dedicated FRED machine at Princeton. Tim's solution (thank you, Tim) appears to be working for us at the moment, but it would be good to have a stable fix if others are experiencing the same behavior.

Best,

Kelly

[Lachlan Glanville]

Thanks everyone for your experiences. I tried Tim's solution which didn't work for me. I've ended up removing the partition and setting up a VM, but it's not an ideal solution. 

[Lora Woodford]

Hi folks,

Wondering if there is any update on this issue, as I've just encountered it as well when attempting to upgrade our dual-boot FRED (Win7/BitCurator) from BC 1.6.10 to 1.8.2.  I've tried Tim's fix, but no luck.  Manually mounting from tty gets me in, but I still am hitting enough unreliability (including some graphics card issues) that I'm uncomfortable forcing ahead with this fragile setup.  Thinking about rolling back to 1.6 unless anyone has some more up-to-date advice/input.  Thanks in advance!

Lora

Lora J. (Davis) Woodford

Digital Archivist

The Sheridan Libraries

Johns Hopkins University

3400 North Charles Street

Baltimore, MD     21228

(410) 516-589

[Dorothy Waugh]

Hi all,

I'm just echoing Lora's ask about whether there have been any updates on this? We've run into the same situation completely out of the blue (we haven't run any updates and everything was working fine until very recently).

Thank you!

Dorothy

[Sam Meister]

Hello all, 

Just wanted to let you all know that this issue is being investigated and that Kam has narrowed down the likely problems: 

1. Most of these issues can be resolved simply by disabling the software read-only mount enforcement immediately after install. There's no permanent solution for this, other then to ship BitCurator either (a) with read-only mount enforcement disabled - in this case users may still run into the issue if they turn it on and forget before rebooting or (b) remove it entirely. A question for the community, I guess.
2. Users upgrading the environment from the software center or with apt may occasionally see a GRUB update, and will be asked if they want to maintain their existing boot profile or use the package maintainers version. If they do not keep the existing profile, this may cause problems.
3. BitCurator will not install correctly on dual-boot systems running Windows 10 where either Secure Boot is enabled or Fast Startup is enabled. Both should be disabled.
4. Users attempting to install BitCurator from a USB stick as a dual boot on a UEFI system running Windows 10 may inadvertently install using the legacy mode if they do not select "UEFI" mode during bootup (often this requires explicitly bringing up the BIOS boot menu).

He is working on potential fixes and we will update this post as those become available. 

Also, as an FYI the BitCurator Consortium Software Development Committee is finalizing a Software Release schedule which outlines a process for how bug fixes and feature requests will be prioritized and incorporated in a regular release schedule. This draft schedule will be made available for community review and feedback before it gets implemented. The SDC is aiming to have this completed by the end of the summer. 

Best, 

Sam Meister

Preservation Communities Manager 

Educopia Institute

[gregory....@gmail.com]

Hi all,

I wanted to add that I'm still experiencing this after upgrading this week without being aware of the issue, and share my hacky solution. We're using our dedicated BC machine mostly for managing records over fileshares for now, so turning off the write protection isn't an issue. Yet, even after remounting and disabling rbfstab, it still boots to a terminal with read-only access to the disk for whatever reason.

For now, I just put these commands in a script:

#!/bin/bash
sudo mount -o remount,rw '/dev/sda1'
sudo service lightdm start

If you make this an alias in the ~/.bashrc file and make it executable, when it boots into the terminal, you just have to log in and run your alias to bring up the GUI as normal.

Best,

Greg Wiedeman
University Archivist
University at Albany, SUNY