Re: [tlug] Reinstallation and partitions (Mint)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Thomas Blasejewicz writes:

 > I actually took a picture - I mean with a camera. Can I attach such to a 
 > mail here?

You can try.  I'm not sure how the list treats those, though.  It may
strip them, or hold your message.

 > ModemManager [1312]: <info> Caught signal, shutting down ...
 > ModemManager [1312]: <warn> Could not acquire the 
 > 'org.freedesktop.ModemManager1' service name

Aha!  I bet you don't have a modem.  Although the system does its best
to deal with non-existent hardware, some programs for dealing with
hardware get confused if the hardware they expect isn't there.  It's
possible that could confuse the shutdown process enough to hang.

I guess the reason why this only happens after the installation
process is that the installer loads the hardware driver software
(that's the only way to check if the hardware exists), finds no
hardware, and removes the driver from the startup and shutdown lists
*for future boots*.  But during installation the driver has already
been loaded, and then the shutdown process tries to shut off the
hardware it controls -- and fails because the hardware isn't there.
The computer equivalent of "phantom limb pain."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_limb

As for needing to power off,I suspect that the shutdown script
probably disables Ctrl-Alt-Del to prevent you from hitting it while
the shutdown is writing data to disks.

 > After I powered it down and up again ... I cannot really see any 
 > anomalies ...

Good.

 > If this is a hardware problem, what should / need I look for?

I think we'd need to know what scripts are run at shutdown, in what
order, and see the messages.  But since you can start / shutdown /
restart, my guess is that it's either a bug in the installer or modem
driver, or your hardware is different from what the modem driver
expects, and when the shutdown process tells the driver to shut down
the modem, it tells some hardware somewhere the shut down ... in modem
language which the other hardware knows nothing about.

By the way, I'm trying to explain in plain English, but feel free to
tell me if you don't want the explanations about how missing hardware
could cause problems.

 > Since it is working ... probably I don't need to do anything,
 > right?

Well, if the Mint list were still working, I might say to write a bug
report to them. :-)  But I am pretty sure that the problem is related
to the install process (perhaps for the reason I gave above), so
unless you run into similar problems now you don't need to worry about
the hardware.

Steve