Motion complains about not being able to create pid file on computer start up. Runs just fine in daemon mode with manual start.

[Nathaniel Homier]

Binary package hint: motion

motion.pid is not created. I noticed there was no motion directory in /var/run. I purged motion and reinstalled using Ubuntu Software Center, which is how I originally installed. For purging I used Synaptic. Upon reinstall, the motion directory was created in /var/run. Upon "$ sudo service motion start" in motion directory in /var/run/motion there was no motion.pid file seen. I have no idea why motion is not creating the pid file. However I am eager to debug motion if you tell me how to do it.

I originally noticed a problem in motion upon reboot of my computer. Motion did not start and complained about not being able to create pid file. And there was no motion directory in /var/run. Manually starting motion using "$ sudo service motion start" the daemon runs just fine, but no pid file is created.

/etc/default/motion daemon is set to yes.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: motion (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-25.45-generic 2.6.32.21+drm33.7
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-25-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: amd64
CheckboxSubmission: f28209556208badd1b7f1481d04b096c
CheckboxSystem: 6ce041aeed0a2c17b3343b66d157175d
Date: Wed Oct 20 12:17:47 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100427.1)
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: motion

[Conan (richard-connon)]

This is obviously because the /var/run directory is mounted with tmpfs so on reboot the /var/run/motion directory is deleted.

The init script will have to check this directory exists and create it with owner and group "motion" before dropping privs to run the daemon.