-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Les wrote: > On Fri, 2007-02-02 at 08:07 -0500, David King wrote: >> ThinkPad Z60t, FC 4 and X11 6.8.2. All of a sudden, after working fine >> for months, X fails to start at boot and I get an error in Xorg.0.log >> that says "shmget(lowmem) error: Invalid argument". I haven't messed >> with the system config lately so I can't imagine what's causing this. I >> think I've eliminated hardware problems as a cause, Knoppix and a new >> install of FC6 on another drive both start X just fine. >> >> A Google search on this error finds a couple of occurrences, one of >> which was solved by freeing up buffer space that had been dedicated to >> TCP buffers. I haven't been doing anything like that on my machine but >> that solution suggests this problem might have something to do with low >> memory utilization. >> >> I've got no idea how to go about troubleshooting this error. Any help >> would be appreciated. Otherwise I'll have to rebuild from scratch and I >> really hate to do that. > A change such as you have described, along with no similar issues would > make memory a suspect. Try the memtest recommended in some of the other > threads. Many notebooks do not have Error Correcting Memory (ecc > designation) and will not show parity errors. However when memory fails > you can get strange errors, not detectable by loading other programs. Right, I should have thought of that. Ran multiple passes of memtest overnight without finding anything wrong. Probably not memory. So I resign myself to reinstalling the system and start doing so on another disk. In the process I install my display switching setup which involves a custom Fn-F7 hotkey script that handles switching from the oddball 1280x768 normal resolution for this machine to a 1024x768 resolution that works with a projector while turning off horizontal expansion and turning the CRT port on, accomplished with xrandr and the ibm-acpi driver. Somehow, after setting that up and testing it in the new system install, when I swap disks back to the old system where I was seeing the original problem in order to copy over some data, the problem is gone. Very strange. So my story, and I'm sticking to it, is that somehow some bit somewhere got twiddled in a way that a power cycle wouldn't fix it and my poking at the video hardware with xrandr and ibm-acpi during the clean system install cleared the problem. Ok, not sure I buy that either but my fingers, and toes, are all crossed. - -- David King dave@xxxxxxxxxxxx -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFFxfjl9MwXyJ3K2skRAhTEAKCxCFp/8hNaeEkEZY+TiGsntUjNrACeN+hD +sPh4AzHL2e6FmSiAtQZymo= =JhdL -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
