Process Failure Mystery

[charles peirce]

I'm still fairly new, and this problem has me stumped.

I noticed, through print failure, that CUPS wasn't running at boot, and wouldn't run manually. Other processes also aren't starting at boot as they should: (a sampling)
ampd
courier daemons
cups
cupsys
hotkey-setup
hplip
laptop-mode
powernowd
ppp
rsync
vbesave

Most of the others are running... I figured I'd check the boot log to see if something was amiss, but I get the message:
"The file '/var/log/boot.log' does not exist"

I wonder, do I need to reinstall, or can someone help?
thanks 1,000,000.
CP

[askrieger]

Re: Process Failure Mystery

The file you're looking for is called /var/log/dmesg. You can also rerun it by running the command "sudo dmesg | less" (if you don't pipe it to less, more, or most, the contents will fly by). The cups error log is found at /var/log/cups/error_log. You might also want to check the presence of the appropriate files /etc/rcS.d and (especially) rc2.d, that's where most of the services you're missing should be started.

I wish I could point you to a good reference to the init procedures, but I learned init from the printed documentation that came with the Mandrake 8.2 boxed set, and that reference is no longer available, and not relevant to a Debian based distro. You'll have to google/linux for the info. I know, I know it's not user friendly for me to say that.