--=.Vj)5m/lzdfI2S9 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I spent 13 hours Saturday getting RH 7.2 installed on my notebook. Perhaps with this message, some of you will be able to reduce this time to 2 or 3 hours. This message will help those trying to use devfs or cardbus cards on a notebook. First, I must say that my problems were mostly due to my attempts to upgrade RH 7.2 to the 2.4.14 Linux kernel. If I had stayed with the generic installation, I would have not have had the lengthy installation time. Although my installation take longer for me to do because I go through and select all the packages I might want. The first thing I did was save the original /etc directory. I would have had significant difficulties if I hadn't. I was able to refer to the old configuration values of a "working" system. I have three filesystem partitions on my notebook /, /boot, /home. I reformated / as ext3 and upgraded /home to ext3. /boot was too small to be worth upgrading to ext3. RH 7.2 ships with a 2.4.7 kernel. There is 2.4.9 kernel as an update. In fact, RH updated the 2.4.9 kernel again this week (last week it was 2.4.9-9 and this week it is 2.4.9-13). I wanted to upgrade my system to 2.4.14 with three patches applied: Ext3, LVM, and UML. All three patches applied without difficulty. I also enabled devfd in my kernel. RH must love GRUB. RH's kernel RPMs just have to supply a replacement for grub.conf, no extra work. GRUB knows how to access the filesystem on bootup, so it only needs to know the hard disk, partition, and pathname of the installed kernel. LILO on the other hand, must have the list of hard disk blocks that contain the kernel, which means tha LILO must be rerun every time you install a kernel. You never have to run GRUB after it has been put in the MBR. GRUB also has a pretty in RH 7.2. But this thread about GRUB is off my intended topic. After getting the generic RH 7.2 system up and running, I installed the 2.4.14 kernel on the hard disk and rebooted. The system came up, mounted /, but could not find / again to remount it read/write. RH will not boot if the hard disks are read-only. The problem was due to my using devfs and not having devfsd running to maintain backward compatibility with /dev device names. I then discovered devfsd was not installed on my system, it was not on RH 7.2 CDs, and after a web search, it was not part of RH 7.1 either. But I did discover that is was part of the RH 7.1 update. I decided to get the latest source for devfsd and compile that. Naturally, the source would not compile due to unresolved references. So I grabbed the RPM from the RH 7.1 update and installed that. It's been working great. Now with devfsd running, the system would boot, and with a tweak to devfsd's config, I was also was able to get it to boot into X11 (GDM) (Also see the last paragraph, as that happened here). I was ready for my next challenge, getting the cardbus network card running. This proved to be a most lengthy attempt. With nearly a dozen kernel compiles (on a 300 MHz PII no less, thankfully I only did one "make clean"). I fought to get the card to work. The cardctl program could see and identify the card, but the system would not initialize it. The dongle would light both the 10 and 100 LEDs when the card was reset, but it would only light the 10 LED afterwards (I'm on a 100base-TX network so this wasn't good). After many compilations I had two facts stand out: 1) RH 7.2 was not using the "kernel" PCMCIA drivers and I was, and 2) the "kernel" cardbus uses hotplug rather than the PCMCIA stuff. This led me to /etc/hotplug. Naturally, I could not make heads or tails hotplug scripts. Determining what's wrong with a script is hard, especially in the vaccuum of not knowing what a script is supposed to do. But I did now that this worked in my previous installation on my notebook. It was running RH 7.1 but with the kernel upgraded to 2.4.10. So I decided to peek at my old copy of /etc/hotplug/net.agent to see how they differed. And differ they did. Major changes. Still not knowing how the script worked, I renamed the current version of net.agent to net.agent.new and copied the old version over to replace it. I then manually ejected the card and reinserted. Both LEDs blinked on, then the 100 LED turned on. As a test, I was able to ping other systems on my network. I was also able to mount my NFS directories without problems, which would not work on the generic RH 7.2 kernel. The only problem I was not able to solved was getting my kernel to boot in framebuffer mode and then start X11. I finally removed the framebuffer from my kernel to get past this problem. Someday I might try this again. -Paul --=.Vj)5m/lzdfI2S9 Content-Type: application/pgp-signature -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE77Rad8BiPBVpHKeYRAkIAAKDf3oWUkGmrcJ3xgApfpRC1y0aXjACg8sRs ahpM4NXdFzfLOsJJ5qF0kpI= =PCat -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --=.Vj)5m/lzdfI2S9--