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Q: What do you do with a perfectly functional Linux box?
A: Format the hard drive and start over.
Well, late (I mean late) last night, I dropped the Slackware CD back in the drive and started over. I’m planning on keeping a running log here (as my profile on gaim isn’t exactly available yet). :) Good stuff is happening.
After a silly fight with forgetting how to create a user and then “unlock” the user account so it can be used in a log in, I started going through the startup logs. The hotplug service is still locking up the startup (as was the case on the previous install), but USB is actually working under Kernel 2.4.26, which is amazing. As soon as I get home from (ahem) work, I will be getting my USB drive to work. Previously, I was thinking the USB controller was locking up hotplug. Now I’m thinking it’s the SCSI modules or APM (details below). This is good news.
eth0 (the primary NIC) is not working, which is 99.9% surely the fault of hotplug being disabled. The current working theory is cleaning up the modprobe errors in the kernel startup will allow hotplug to work, which will in turn allow eth0 to be loaded as a valid interface. If not, I’ll just modify modules.conf to load the proper driver for eth0 manually. This will at least get me on the web, just in case I need to download the Kernel 2.6 sources. :)
Modules that have been giving the kernel grief are:
char-major-10-134
scsi_hostadapter
block-major-8
Major 8 is the SCSI disk device. I’m just going to alias that to usb-storage since it’s the only SCSI functionality I have. SCSI is a major hassle, but it’s also the method Linux uses to talk to USB flash drives. scsi_hostadapter has already been silenced by my mighty hand by aliasing it in the same fashion. Major 10 is, as I’m learning, a major thorn in the side of many non-laptop Linux boxes, as Major 10 handles APM (laptop power management: suspend, hibernate) and other functions. “Other functions” is the only reason I’m not just really excited to put in
alias char-major-10-134 off
which, of course, is the kernel module loading equivalent of a middle finger to the driver.
“Other functions” apparently has something to do with expanded features of the real time clock, but further reading has convinced me that the overall importance of the module is somewhere on the order of “Meh” level.
X worked great under default configuration. One font directory is missing (which I will hopefully just install from a tarball soon, otherwise I’ll just knock that line out of the X config file), and that annoying “missing catalog” error still shows up this time, which is something that I will figure out sometime very soon. It has to do with language support in blackbox, and it’s definitely high up on my problems hit list. I moved from fluxbox to blackbox on the basis of simplicity and stability. After browsing the BlackBox CVS source tree I think I know what to download (when eth0 or my USB drive go up) to fix that language catalog bug. With no floppy drive, I’m a bit marooned until one or the other file transfer methods starts working.
The system feels fast, and I think sticking with Kernel 2.4 will allow me to hold on to the stability and cohesiveness of Slackware in a better way. agpgart and all that other wonderful 3D acceleration support is working, which is really more than I could say about my Kernel 2.6 custom build. I think I’ll leave that stuff to the experts (especially when dealing with a brand-new Shuttle mainboard that has onboard video, audio, and LAN on a proprietary ATI chipset).
More updates to follow today!