Well after recently having very good success installing Mandrake 8.1 under VmWare, I upgraded the hard drive in my laptop and since it was an empty disk I decided to take a shot at installing Mandrake 8.1. Imagine my surprise when Mandrake smoothly and happily found pretty much all the hardware and even managed to get X configured on the first attempt! To make things even more amazing, Mandrake noticed the LinkSys wireless PCMCIA card I had placed in the system and brought it up! Really impressive.
But now to the problems that I've had all along with this laptop. It uses ACPI power management hardware. I'd really like to make full use of the power management but building a new kernel has been a bit of a pain. First, Mandrake as far as I can tell doesn't ship the kernel sources on any of the CDs. I was easily able to copy them down from rpmfind but I was running around in circles for a while figuring out exactly which rpms were needed. The kernel sources rpm depends on a version ncurses. I downloaded that and then the kernel sources installed ok. Now it gets more interesting. The kernel that Mandrake put on my laptop is almost 100% in terms of it's recognizing and using the system hardware. But the kernel sources don't have the specific kernel configuration that was used to build the kernel on the distro. I did notice that there are a bunch of .config files saved in a directory on the system with names like "mumble-kernel-enterprsed.config" and so on. It seems possible that Mandrake actually has the configuration file somewhere on the system but I'm not sure which one, if any, is the correct one. At any rate, I took a flyer on configuring the kernel using 'make xconfig'. I guessed at what most of the likely options would be making as many modular as possible. The kernel built fine. I copied it to /boot and then modified lilo.conf to add the new kernel so that I could test it. On the reboot I selected my new kernel and at the point where it would fsck the disk, it said "Can't fsck, hard drive hda1 already mounted". I did notice that there was a kernel configuration option "automatically mount disks" and I'm suspicious that I should have said 'no' rather than 'yes' to that option. Oddly enough, if I ignored the warnings and kept pushing the system to continue to boot it made it all the way up and X started ok. I did see lots of "undefined symbol" messages and the PCMCIA support didn't start. Since I didn't build the modules in a separate step, I'm guessing that I need to build/re-build the modules. That brings up another question. The Mandrake installed kernel is clearly using modules that are already on the system. If I rebuild the modules, will that mess up the kernel that mostly runs correctly? If the kernel that was installed and the kernel sources are the same rev (2.4.8-26), why do I need to rebuild modules? Is there an easy way for the two sets of modules to co-exist if I need to have two sets to support two different kernels? Any takers? -Alex P.S. I'm so close to having my laptop work properly that I'm really hoping to be able to ditch Windows on this rig! ;^) Wirth's Law: Software gets slower faster than Hardware gets faster! "On the side of the software box, in the 'System Requirements' section, it said 'Requires Windows 95 or better'. So I installed Linux." - Anonymous Want to know what it looked like 1, 10, 100, 1000, 1,000,000 years ago? Just look up on a clear night! ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
