On Wednesday 27 October 2004 10:18, John Layt wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 16:13, Kaj Haulrich wrote:
> > Even in runlevel 3 i can see the process going on
> > (in /var/log/messages). The system connects/disconnects its
> > USB device until hell freezes over or I reboot.
> >
> > As a last resort I re-installed 10.1 CE from scratch, copied
> > nothing back from my backup CDs, updated available rpms and
> > tried anew. Still staring at my runaway box.
> >
> > I have reached the point of considering a switch to some other
> > distro, maybe Fedora or Debian.
>
> Well, at the risk of sounding obvious, I would venture there's
> something up with the kernel v2.6.8 usb drivers and your camera,
> and not anything to do with the desktop or apps. You could try
> installing and booting an earlier kernel, like whatever the last
> one for 10.0 was (2.6.3?), or worse yet try the 2.4 kernel that
> comes with 10.1 . Just install them in addition to the current
> 2.6.8 kernel, reboot into one of them, and see if they behave any
> better.
>
> Or it could be udev, which is new to 10.1 for managing devices in
> place of devfs. You could try reverting to using devfs under the
> 2.6.8 kernel. Just go into the lilo config in mcc and modify the
> boot options to remove the "devfs=nomount" part, reboot and watch
> for the message that udev is disabled due to devfs being used,
> then try your luck. In fact, try this first before you try any
> other kernels, I have a hunch it might work, if it doesn't then
> it definately is kernel usb driver problems.
>
> If none of this works, and even if you decide to change distros,
> please file a bug report with Mandrake so they can fix it for
> other people, including whatever distro you move to :-)
Thank you, John. You certainly are on the right track. Before I
re-installed 10.1 CE I actually tried to install the 10.0 kernel
(2.6.3 something). During that process I noticed something I never
saw before : some messages about reconfiguring something (scrolled
by too fast for reading). Hereafter I tried to reboot into that
kernel with the devastating result that my filesystem (ReiserFS)
borked completely. No "rescue" - attempt possible, be it from the
install CDs, MandrakeMove or Knoppix. That forced the complete
re-install of 10.1 CE.
Now, I experimented a little bit further : I unplugged my scanner
(which is connected to another USB port), re-connected the camera
and you know what ? : up popped the good old harddisk icon on my
screen with all my photos in it. Swell. At the same time I
noticed that my fstab had changed, added a line like :
/dev/sda1 /mnt/camera auto
umask=0022,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,kudzu,codepage=850,noauto,exec,users
0 0
which seems strange to me, because I thought I was the only "root"
here allowed to edit that file. After a new reboot, that line was
removed from fstab again.
So, obviously the USB/devfs/udev is behaving somewhat, unable to
segregate between the scanner and the camera.
I'll try to follow your advice strictly, performing a gradual
lobectomy to lilo.conf's "append" line.
I really would hate to switch distro because of this minor problem.
BTW : How to file a bug report to Mandrake ???
Thanks again for your excellent ideas, John.
Kaj Haulrich.
--
*sent from a 100% Microsoft-free workstation*
* http://haulrich.net *
*Running Linux (Mandrake 10.1) - kernel 2.6.8*
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