Less, man, and 2.6.7+
 

Hi all;

I recently had a big annoying problem when i updated to the 2.6.10 linux kernel. The problem occured when I went to open a file with less on the console and all I would get is one screen of information before bash returned to the prompt. In other words i could not page the file at all. The funny part is that more and other pagers worked.
In addition the man pages did the same thing, except at the bottom of the output there was an error (sorry dont have the error). Closer examining this error I found that it was a problem with less.

Going to the less homepage (www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less) I found that there was incompatibility issues with the 2.6.7+ kernels and older versions of udev, which causes a problem with less (if anyone would like to explain why this problem occured please do so). Since I am running the version of udev that came with my slack 10 distributions, I believe it is outdated. So I went to kernel.org and downloaded the latest udev as suggested (v. .050 at the time of writing this post), unpacked the tarball, ran 'make' and 'make install', and restarted my computer. And whalah less and man worked (its kinda wierd cause i have to 'refesh' the screen by opening vim or something similar (ctrl-L does not cut it) for less and man to display properly. any insight on this would be appreciated).

Anyways, Im posting this cause I havent found that much documentation concerning this problem (which i believe to be due to the fact the 2.6.7 did not come out a long time ago and most people have not upgraded yet (correct me if im wrong)).

Good luck, and if anyone has any comments or suggestions or similar stories, keep this post updated.

I used 2.6.7 for some time and never had such problems, nor I have them with 2.6.9. In fact man uses less to display the manpages, and if less isn't available it uses more. Maybe your problem depends of the kernel config, I don't know, but it's strange. I can't be of any help, sorry.

PS: Maybe some of the less environment variables or cmdline options will help?

thanks for the feedback but I had already got it working by updating udev. I just posted as to offer a suggestion to anyone with a similar problem. Also im beginning to suspect the display problem has to do with the tux boot logo at the top of the screen. Im gonna disable it and see what happens. Thanks though!

If the tux logo is displayed on the boot, I have some problems with pagers and text editors (joe). The problems diasppear after destroing the image, (e.g. selecting with the gpm the whole console)

i am having the same problem as you so i did some reading on udev and it seems like it is very important to the system. what is a safe way to update it. i dwl the new version of udev. where should i unpack and install it to? how can i make sure it doesnt interfere with the orginol version? should i remove the older versions? how should i do that?

thanks