Hi Community

I tried (hard) to get Slacked with r11 & a 2.6 "huge26.s" kernel, and failed.

(complete outline on getshotwithlinux.blogspot.com)

Main outcomes where:
-No Sound
-No Network
-No Mouse
-Incorrect Keyboard

&& messed up with runlevel of inittab to log into X.
Multiple edits of xorg.conf didn't help but for the keyboard.

I am not that of a hardcore expert to be able to save myself over a no-mouse interface, so I dropped the ball when inittab set to runlevel 4 messed up going in-&-out of X. The mouse was only a target to try to fix the sound & network issues anyway. I copied the mouse section from my SuSE93 xorg.conf, changed the path to both "mouse" & "mice".

No special warning showed up during intsall. This 6-year old PC successfully loaded SuSE93, UBUNTU, KUBUNTU in various flavors, Xandros (that was a long time ago!) EliveCD & openSUSE10.2. It's a P4 1.6 with 512ram & 32 video.

I spent 1.5 days on that, browsing this forum on a spare laptop with little success.

Now for the real question:

I wanted a 2.6 kernel because I share a lot over flashdrives, have colleagues dropping in with theirs & so on: External backup HDD... and, unfortunately, USB printer & scanner.

Any link to a "USB in 2.4.33 for Slack make easy" available ? What I found seemed outdated or _really_ complicated.

Thanks,

Jean-Philippe.
[I noticed a lot of RTFM-types of answers around here. I don't mind it, as long as you provide a link to _which/where_ as RTFM repy! I did my homework.]

Hmmm ... so you were trying huge26.s ? Did you install the kernel modules ?

What do you mean incorrect keyboard ? I don't quite understand.

The more detail on each step that you can give, the better people here can help you. I didn't see too many RTFM responses on this forum ... only in cases of extreme ness ...

Hi texmex.

AFAIK, the modules where not loaded at startup. lsmod returns nothing under slack11 - I wasn't aware of this command, I had to compare the output of it from the SuSE93 partition to understand.

[thanks for the suggestion, so how to install/allow them?]

My Keyboard is french/belgian (azerty). Living in Cambodia & working in English on a "belgian" machine fooled other OS'es bofore I must confess

The feeling I had was indeed that install ran properly, but not everything was "present" after boot: During install, keyboard was defined for instance, but did not showed up "in" xorg.conf.

My next target is still to run Slack11 with a 2.4 kernel, as Quoted here that "there is a good reason why this beaten-up, fully cooked kernel is still the default one", if I can run USB hardware with some flexibility.

I do not feel I missed something during the install process that seemed straightforward for me: I checked that installing under the 2.4 kernel did not showed the external USB hdd, so booted rthe install process on huge26.s. I choosed "expert" & only removed obviously uneeded hardware stuff like raid for instance. Oterwise, pretty much all the DVD went on the HDD, but for LILO as I wanted to stick with GRUB that served me with confidence over the years. [nothing against LILO here, it's only that with a safe copy of the GRUB config files at hand, I knew I was able to reboot into the former SuSE93 partition & keep wy "work-ability" under control, safety measure only].

Suggestions for my next install ? 2.4 & some learning or 2.6 & some tweakings ?

Well, as root, mount the Slackware install CD/DVD with 'mount /dev/hdc /mnt/tmp' (or if it's not hdc then whatever it is), cd into '/mnt/tmp/extra/linux-2.6.17.13' directory of the Slackware install CD/DVD and 'installpkg kernel-modules-2.6.17.13-i486-1.tgz'.

Then, run 'xorgsetup' as root to set up xserver properly (including that keyboard). Remember to do this when xserver is down or it won't work. You might need to add:

to the "Monitor" section of '/etc/X11/xorg.conf' when 'xorgsetup' is done.

Or whatever the values are for your monitor. This is 60 kHz, 75 Hz.

That should solve:
-No Network
-No Mouse
-Incorrect Keyboard

For sound, make sure the sound levels are not muted. Run 'alsamixer' or 'aumix'.

That's helpful indeed, thanks. Building skills here...

I had a go on the readme alongside in the /extra/kernel2.6.17 of the slack CD, it shows if I use anything other than ext2 filesystem over IDE, I must build an initrd file. My current save-my-arse suse10.2 has indeed a very long initrd (visibly full of stuff I do not need, like frequency scaling or battery monitoring on a desktop P4!), the filesystem I generally use is ext3, so it may be the trick explaining why I didn't have any modules loaded.

Got it! (sound of coin falling in the slot): In menu.lst of Grub, I noticed the lack of initrd file in /boot of Slack, while it does exists & is visibly used by Grub to boot the old SuSE93 - preventing me from just selecting Grub "slack" item & go for a command line that, found somewhere, pretended to boot slack with only target, kernel & root definition, without hint or use of an initrd file. So, all this resumes to No initrd file & improper use of GRUB.

I may have to do this after installing the modules following your help, but now I kinda know how to check.

Hence, next target is now keep 2.6 but over ext2, after proper mkinitrd command. A pity my real-world duties forced me to erase the slack to put this bloated (& buggy) suse10.2 instead.

As soon as suse10.2 is somewhat good enough to ensure transition, I'll go for Slack over the former suse93.

Thanks again, any other suggestion welcome. I'll give feedback so this thread may be helpful to others.

I agree ... (same goes for FC6 if I must say so).

Well, the slackbook is a good place to learn more about a lot of things ... (check my sig)

I'm not exactly sure how grub works, but I hope you configured it properly. If you're booting huge26.s you won't need initrd because most everything is built-in to the kernel. The modules will be loaded later in the boot process, and you should have internet (one of the modules is likely needed for your network card).

I am OK with Grub, from what I saw in the Config-your-LiLo helps, the arguments looks the same. The only argument I have about Grub is that it autoupdates itself, no need to run it like LiLo, but it's a small thing I believe.

Now for the frightening advice:

_that_ I feel uncomfortable with, as uname -r showed I was using the right 2.6 kernel, but lsmod returned empty.

Are you on an ext2 partition?

No, I use JFS.

So, you installed the kernel modules ?

Well, you can try to make an initrd ... it won't hurt I suppose.

The two other installs of which I can "lookUp" the configs now both have an initrd, and the said initrd is referenced by a grub config line that looks pretty much the same as the lilo config when using initrd: apart from Targets vmlinuz & root disk, definition of VGA mode, the only other parameter is the Target initrd.

The installed, no-modules-loaded-at-boot kernel was 2.6.17.13, original from ISO DVD downloaded on 01 01 2007.

I will try huge26.s with initrd buildup as refenrenced on the readme found in /extra/linux-2.6.17.13/README.initrd

Thanks, I'll report.

Hi

Did it the safe way finally, with a 2.4 kernel.

Faced some issues, but this time they were solvable:

-edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf for mouse, keyboard
-edit /ect/fstab for automount of other Linux disks

Network good, lsmod returns plenty of modules, still have to play around with Grub to have an easy start.

did not yet fiddled with the runlevels, but can "startx" this time

all usb drives are in fstab as of now, I can unmount them manually & a simple "mount -a" gives them back to a single location.

There was a reason 2.4 is still the default one: it works.

--no sound as of now, no muted outputs, lame loaded xmms playing mp3's, dunno, will browse the forum--

Thanks

I see no reason why a 2.6.x kernel won't work. Maybe you can try compiling one yourself. Of course, if you're happy with a 2.4.x, then stay with that.

Thanks,

2.6 up and running, did it the safe way: 2.4 default install, ext2 partition, then Grub backup, instalpkg from the Slack DVD (including the modules!) & edit grub' menu.lst to point to each available kernel separately.

[ Yes, I can still launch the 2.4 kernel if I want to ]

Got 'Net, Sound. Mouse & keyboard settings were preserved. I did an update of the system later on. I still have issues, sure, and will post here if I can't sort them out myself: sloppy DVD, some E issues.

On the other Successes: I have "entrance" login, (runlevel4), DR17 window manager by default, all CVS download / install. Slackware is the only distro that allowed to me the make >> make install routine successfully.

[ Checkinstall didn't create a SlackPKG though, and makeinitrd did not created an initrd for me either, but that's econdary ]

blog here:
!GetShot!

Cheers !
Good day today.