What used to be a simple little project has now turned into a nightmare. Let me give you the whole story. If you want to read it, that's great and I think it would help to understand the context of the problem that I'm having, but I guess you don't have to (unless you like stories).
I decided to get back into Linux again. After SUSE messed up my laptop quite a bit, I uninstalled everything and let all my Linux stuff sit for a year or so. Consequently, I have lost most of my skills in Linux and that's why I'm posting in the newbie forum.
I wanted to get back into Linux with project. A cluster to be exact. I bought 3 $30 computers at a flea market of sorts and was graciously given a monitor and a somewhat new computer by a family member who had recently upgraded. I also bought another excellent ViewSonic monitor. Anyways...
I installed Redhat 9 into all of them. Then, I used the latest version of the openMosix kernel RPM - version 2.4.26-openmosix1. Again, a perfect install. Finally, I put in the patched kernel source RPM (kernel-source-i386-2.4.26-openmosix1 or something like that). The website for openMosix (if you don't already know) is
http://openmosix.sf.net . Now, here comes the tricky part:
I have an NVidia graphics card in the computer that I designate as a "master" (it's really just the one I attach the keyboard and monitor to). Being a perfectionist, I wanted to install the NVidia graphics card driver. This would give me accelerated 3D support, etc. Simple right? I have the kernel source in the /usr/src/linux-2.4.26-openmosix1/ directory and it's the same version as the RPM, so it should compile and install the driver fine. WRONG!!! When I ran the installer, it complained about how I had the rivafb driver either compiled into the kernel or as a module. So, I guessed it would probably be a module and I would have an easy time by just using rmmod. Wrong again. It turned out that it was compiled into the kernel (argh) and I had to recompile the kernel.
Let me say something here. I'm very scared of recompiling the kernel. I've done it before and things turned out into a giant mess. I've had to reinstall 5 gB of software several times. Kernel compilation scares me.
So, I did:
make oldconfig
And answered N to all the new stuff.
Then I did:
make xconfig
And found that the rivafb driver was completely grayed out so it wouldn't be installed.
Then, in the Makefile, I set EXTRAVERSION to be -openmosix1a so I wouldn't be compiling over a good kernel.
Then:
make dep
make bzImage
make modules && make modules_install
cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.26-openmosix1a
cp System.map /boot/System.map-2.4.26-openmosix1a
ln -s /boot/System.map-2.4.26-openmosix1a /boot/System.map
mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.4.26-openmosix1a.img 2.4.26-openmosix1a
Then, I edited the grub.conf file properly.
Okay, so it looks like I'm all set to go.
I restart my computer and select the new kernel.
It starts by loading up and somewhere in there, it says that the ext3 module can't be loaded because it can't be found.
Then init starts and I get a bunch of errors with USB modules not being found.
Then net modules not being found.
Basically, no modules were loaded. I ignored this for the moment and went to install the NVidia drivers. They installed fine.
Then I rebooted again (just for fun I guess) and the modules still weren't being loaded. I went to /lib/modules/2.4.26-openmosix1a and was quite surprised at what I saw.
Here's somewhat of a directory listing:
Code:
/lib/modules/2.4.26-openmosix-1a
|--drivers
. |--net
. |--dummy.o
. |--video
. |--nvidia.o
That's it. No other modules. No wonder the modules weren't being found.
My question is this:
Where did my modules go? Or if they were compiled into the kernel (which they might have been), why does it complain that it can't find modules?
Here is my guess:
Before starting configuration of the kernel and such, the guides say to do make mrproper. I'm not sure what it does, but one guide says it cleans up stale files. I think that my modules were compiled into the kernel but there is a so-called "stale" file in there that tells to look for modules. It's a stupid guess, I know, so that's why I'm asking before I do anything to mess up my system even more.
Thanks so much for your help.
