Easy Excalibur login hang fixed

There have been many weeks of problems with Easy Excalibur hanging/freezing. Really weird issues, fixed one at a time, see this post:

"Another hang at bootup fixed"
https://bkhome.org/news/202508/another-hang-at-bootup-fixed.html

However, the "big one" has been hanging at login, in particular on my 2024 Asus Zenbook laptop. Boots the first time, no problem, maybe second time, maybe third, then hangs at login. It manages to print the /etc/motd file, then hangs. And hangs consistently after that.

Tried all sorts of things, including rollback the kernel from 6.12.41 to 6.6.75 -- then the Zenbook came good, booted OK several times -- thought great, and wrote this post:

"Random hanging with 6.12 kernel"
https://bkhome.org/news/202508/random-hanging-with-612-kernel.html

But no, celebrated too soon. Login also hangs with the 6.6.75 kernel.

Of course I tried all sorts of things to narrow-down the cause of the hang.

I'm reminded of Easy Daedalus, built with Debian Bookworm packages; LibreOffice hung at bootup. I tried to trace the code, and found it was waiting for some event, but I couldn't determine what would cause that event. Couldn't solve it, so compiled LibreOffice, without any of the Debian patches, then it worked.

Note, no problem with Debian's LibreOffice in Easy Excalibur.

Easy Excalibur uses 'mingetty' to login. This is busybox login, and this is /etc/inittab:

::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
tty1::respawn:/sbin/mingetty --autologin root tty1
tty2::respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/reboot

Have done login this way for 20+ years, no problem until now. So, I wondered, if compile mingetty statically linked with musl, to get it out of the clutches of Debian's glibc and any related login factors, maybe that would fix login. But no, it didn't, which surprised me.

In Easy Excalibur, login is setup to use busybox simple login, and /usr/bin/login and /usr/sbin/init are symlinks to busybox. Somehow though it seems that there is a "non busybox" blockage. Right, so to force login to use only busybox login, I changed /etc/inittab to this:

::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
tty1::respawn:/usr/bin/busybox login -f root
tty2::respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/reboot

...and, it works. Have tested multiple bootups, on five different computers; success.

Any disadvantage to not using a getty utility to login? No, don't see any. If doing a remote login via a serial terminal, then maybe, but we just don't have that situation.

Final comment; the problem has not been solved, it has just been "stepped around". But, I'm happy with that, as the workaround is a simplification, meaning one less thing to go wrong.   

Tags: easy