Subtitle: My experiences installing a vew video card, kernel 2.4,
ReiserFS, XFree 4.02, DevFS and upgrading to testing all in the same
day.
This is a (probably long) recounting of my experiences doing a bit of an
upgrade. Those stuck in Potato-land and wanting to try out new-and-cool
stuff, but a bit worried about making the transition, might be
interested in how I found it. If you're happily running Potato and don't
want to tempt fate, or already well into Sid and laugh at the face of
danger, this may not be of any interest to you, so feel free to use that
`D' key (I wont be offended...)
This all started, last december, when my power suply of my debian
machine decided to die. At the time, I was pretty broke, and wanted to
get a new you-beaut, double fan, 400W, extra-silent power suply.
Unfortunately the place I knew stocked it was closing for christmas
until mid Jan, but, I figured, I was going to be away or on the move for
a lot of the time in between, so I could wait. As a result, between mid
december and yesterday, I hadn't booted my debian machine (the
withdrawel symptoms are just starting to subside...).
The consequences of this was that 2.4, testing, and the availability of
XF4 debs for Potato came out, and I had no way to check them out.
So, finally my new power suply arrived (along with my new Matrox G450,
which was something of an expensive aftertought), and I spent my
Australia Day celebrating 100 years of Federation by rebuilding my
computer. While I'd never replaced a power suply before, everything
worked well first time, which was a pleasant suprise (hardware wise,
anyway).
Okay, so I had a new video card - of course, X (3.3.6) wouldn't run,
would it. I know, however, the card is supported by X4, so I thought,
hmm, A little software upgrade might be the go. Then I thought, well, X4
will run better on a 2.4 kernel, so that might be the go. Then I
thought, well, the ac series of patches for 2.4 has the ReiserFS patches
built in, so that might be the go. Suffice to say, this sort of chain
thinking can be dangerous.
Anyway, with my machine booted into single-user mode (to prevent the
non-working X from crashing the machine hard), I downloaded the 2.4
source and the ac-11 patch, and patched the source. Having been a good
little geek and done my research, I added unstable as deb-src to my
sources.list, and apt'ed and compiled modutils-2.4.1. That installed
without a hitch, and so I got to compiling my kernel.
Configuring 2.4 isn't significantly more difficult than 2.(<=2), but
it's organised a bit differently, and there are a few things that it
took me a while to work out. For example, for the AGP stuff, you have to
tell it what sort of *motherboard* chipset you have, not graphics card
(yes, that's obvious to anyone with half a brain, but I'm stupid, and it
was very hot, and I don't have air-conditioning). I also had no luck
getting the MGA450 fbcon working, but that might have something to do
with the above point.
One thing to note is, that for a kernel-package only about 300k more
than a recent 2.2 kernel, the 2.4 kernels take a *long* time to compile.
It really seemed to take ages. And by the end of the day (2am, or so),
I'd done it about 8 times! Eventually, however, I found a combination
that seemed to work well, which included DevFS.
Now, DevFS is something that I'd wanted to try out because it sounded
cool, but I was a bit cautious. I'd read stories about people getting
kernel panics because it couldn't see their root device, so I didn't
know what to expect.
Guess what, it works really well. Another apt-get source from unstable
(devfsd), build, install, reboot passing "devfs=mount" to the kernel
from lilo, and it just works! I've changed one line in a conf file so
far ("alias /dev/sound sb" in modules.conf), and have not yet had any
problems.
Okay, ReiserFS next. Mind you, at this point I needed it, after having
tried numerous things that required a hard reboot after having frozen
the system or made the console unreadable. Simple option to compile it
into the kernel. Get, build and install the reiserfs tools from
unstable. Kill off a spare partition. mkreiserfs /dev/whatever, change
/etc/fstab to make /dev/whatever use reiserfs. Presto, it too works.
Simple. My root fs is still ext2, but I'm slowly moving the others to
reiser as I go along.
If you want to get a feel of the improvements of reiserfs over ext2,
make your var partition reiserfs and do an ls -la /var/lib/dpkg/info.
Cool, eh?
Okay, so at this stage I had got 2.4 and devfs and reiserfs up and
working nicely (although the AGP revelation was yet to come, so the next
section was always going to be painful...). Next for X4.
I've been keeping up with the mailing list, so I knew that some
wonderful person had packaged X4 for potato. I also knew that
debianplanet had a HOWTO on installing X4 on potato. Off I go.
I purged all the old X packages, as per the howto, and started apting
the X4 packages. I soon had a massive dependency problem, which apt-get
-f install seemed to clean up. Okay, time for the smoke test.
zsh: command not found: startx
D'oh!
Okay, need some more packages, but they depend on libfreetype6, which is
nowhere to be found. apt-get source to the rescue again.
Here I ran into another little problem. Usually, once I have done the
apt-get source, I cd into the directory, and run "debian/rules binary",
but this time got an error (something like No Targets or something).
However, running "debian/rules", and then "debian/rules binary" seemed
to fix it. All is well again, and I install the rest of the needed X4
packages.
A little aside to say that although I have heard people talk about
dexter on the list, the debconf x configuration package works really
well. When I eventually got X going (more on that in a moment), it was
with the configuration file that debconf produced, and it worked great.
My only nag is that it didn't have an option for 1200x1024, which is my
prefered resolution, but it was easy enough to add to the completed
file.
For those still stuck in X3 land, the configuration file of X4 is a
dream. Guess what, no more modelines! If you want 1200x1024, just add
"1200x1024" to the start of the list, and it works! How cool is that! Of
course, I hear it supports modelines, but mine seems to work fine
without it.
Now, backpeddling a bit, I had X installed and configured. This time
startx worked - it successfully brought my machine to a screatching
halt, requiring a hard reboot. Opps...
Ah yes, I have a new video card that isn't supported by X4
out-of-the-provebial-box. Okay, trek over to www.matrox.com to get the
new driver. Again my stupidity rears it's ugly head (I'm blaming the
heat again). The link at the top of the page is to the source - the
binary is at the bottom of the page, under the EULA. In this case,
completely ignoring the EULA is not a good idea, as you'll never find
the binary. Argh! It's quite sad how many hours that left me flumoxed -
was I going to have to compile X from source myself!?
About this time I realised what the story was with AGP in the kernel,
and eventually booted a kerenel in which everything, including AGP
seemed to work. I put the binary matrox module in the correct place,
crossed my fingers, and started X. Dissapointment eventual transformed
into elation as that familiar gnome desktop appeared. I say eventually
because X took a while to start up, and I was close to putting my fist
through the monitor when it eventually did. But it did, so I was happy.
After playing around with the config file to get my prefered resolution,
it was working well. I don't know that I have quite got the DRI thing
nutted out yet, because the GL screensavers seem to be a lot slower than
they should be, but I'll work that out eventually. At least I had X
again (yes, I confess, I've been using windows a bit while my other
machine was down... It feels nice to be back to a real OS again!).
I figured that, as I'd managed to make all these fundamental changes to
my system, and it wasn't quite dawn yet, I may as well go and update to
testing. A quick sources list change, and about 130M later, I'm
officially running testing. The dist-upgrade took a long time, but only
died a few times, which was pretty good for that day.
I have to admit that I appreciate Russel Corker's message at the end of
the lilo configuration - something like "I'm sorry to have destroyed
your data"! However, as I'd been reading the list, I knew to back-up
lilo.conf, so I was safe :)
I've since realised that, had I upgraded to testing sooner, I would have
had to have compiled less packages myself, but that doesn't wory me
greatly. Me and my PC are safely back in debian-land again, and I'm as
close to bleeding-edge as a wuss like me needs to be.
Sorry that was so long, and un-proofread (I don't need to read it, I
know what it's supposed to say, I wrote it!). But hopefully that might
convince someone that change can be managed, or help someone who has got
stuck along the way.
cheers,
damon
--
Damon Muller | Did a large procession wave their torches
Criminologist/Linux Geek | As my head fell in the basket,
http://killfilter.com | And was everybody dancing on the casket...
PGP (GnuPG): A136E829 | - TBMG, "Dead"
