I just used "apt-get dist-upgrade" to move from a slink to a potato distribution on my Laptop (Dell Latitude CPi D300Xt). Had a minor problem with configuring some packages because of perl. I manually "dpkg --install perl*" and then got apt-get going again. Almost succeeded, failing in the end on make-doc (which I'll ignore for now).
My problem is that "pon" (as in ppp) is now failing and I've spent a good few hours trying to figure out why. I'm using PCMCIA. I've recompiled the kernel 2.2.12 and pcmcia-sources, just as I used to with slink. After some odd module problems (unresolved symbols in parport.o and couldn't find module char-major-108, problems that I did not get under slink, even though I started out using the same kernel .config file) the kernel/module things seem okay. Issuing "pon" or pppd directly, I get (in the plog file) chat[...]: Can't get terminal parameters: Input/output error. I believe pppd is working okay, since if I mimic the modem on my interactive tty to get the ATZ stuff, I can respond "OK" to get ATDT etc. The pcmcia modem card seems to be fine, since ejecting and inserting it generates various beeps and the syslog file records the appropriate IRQ (3) and identifies it as a Serial or Modem card. Similarly, "cardinfo" reports the card. If I reboot under WindowsNT the modem works just fine. The modem was working just fine under Slink until I did the upgrade. Installing pcmcia-cs package suggested restarting the daemon, so I did, and since then have had this problem. I'm running out of ideas and things to read. Any suggestions? I wish I had redirected the output from apt-get to some place so I could now read it. Is this information stored anywhere, so I might check for other messages that I missed along the way (the apt-get download took some 24 hours over the modem!). Many thanks in advance..... Cheers, Graham