Kernel woes
 

Okay, I give up, i submit, and i'm generally fed up to the back teeth.
This all started a long time ago (well, about a month ago anyway, it just seems longer), when I tried updating my kernel, by downloading to source rpm for SuSE 8.2 off their FTP (I ran 7.3 at the time). This just completely blew up my linux box when I tried to use the compiled result (no init found, etc) as well as seeming to produce a dud reiserfs module. I FTP installed up to SuSE 8.2, only this didn't fix it. Much help from a suse mailing list got me a running kernel again. However, sound was defunct.
So off I toddle to recompile again. This time, I remembered to keep my working kernel and system.map.
The new kernel blows up in my face. Still no sound, but also now X won't start, complaining it can't find module char-major-195.
So I rename it and the System.map, and plonk back in my old kernel.....which now seems to have stopped working as well :(
I'm stuck, i'm sick of compiling kernels, and i've got a knackered linux box. Can anybody offer any assistance as to how to get a working kernel up and going, preferably with sound working?
System is a Duron processor, SB live! sound card (one that works with linux I know, as it did right at the start), kernel 2.4.20-4GB-athlon all on SuSE 8.2
Any help at all would be very, very appreciated :)

char major 195 i seem to remember is the nvidia driver, the problem is a part of the nvidia driver is dependant on the kernel so when you used the new kernel, the nvidia driver wasnt available so X bombed out, this is easy to fix by either reinstalling the nvidia driver, or using the normal nv driver with X, i would reccommend the second until you have a working kernel.

i cant help with sound as i have never used oss, only alsa so i have to recompile the drivers everythime i recompile a kernel.

i think the reason your old kernel doesnt work properly is because youve installed new modules over it. every time you do a 'make modules_install' it copies the the new modules to /lib/modules/`uname -r`/ so if you compile two kernels that are the same version they overwrite each others modules, the solution to this is to change the value of EXTRAVERSION in the kernel makefile

cant you just grab the old kernel rpm off an install disk and get right back to where you were?

hope some of that helps

Hey there, thanks for the quick response.
The problem is nvidia drivers is it. That would explain a lot, as I didn't re-install, as last time I did any major recompiling (back with kernel 2.2) I never needed to re-instal. Ah well.
As for the sound, i'm trying to use ALSA. The erro complains that it can't find the snd-card-0 module, and to be fair, neither can I. However, alsa support, the emu10k1 driver (or whatever the SBlive! driver is called, and OSS compatibilty are all set to be compiled as modules.
Do I need to re-install alsa? If so, how? The SuSE kernel appears to have it all built in (see above).
Any ideas?
Thanks again, I feel more hopeful now :)

if your kernel has been patched with alsa then you should just be able to choose the right kernel config options to get the modules, what modules do you have in

/lib/modules/'kernelversion'/kernel/drivers/sound

also check your /etc/modules.conf mines not set up properly but apparently it should look something like this:

alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias char-major-116 snd

alias snd-card-0 snd-<soundcard-name>

alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0

alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-midi

Well kev82, you were right, a quick re-run of the NVidia installer, and i'm back in the work of X again :)

As for modules.conf, thats set up right (I hope) as I ran alsaconf, hoping that would fix things.....it does indeed contain all the lines you mentioned.

Okay, in /lib/modules/2.4.20-4GB-athlon/kernel/drivers/sound I have;
a load of drivers which won't affect this (viaxxx.o, ac97.o, etc)
sb_lib.o
sb.o
sound.o
and a dir called emu10k1, which contains,
emu10k1.o

Thats it. That sounds a little sparse to me, but you'l probably know more than I do.... :)
Thanks for the help

what happens if you modprobe emu10k1

Well, if I modprobe emu10k1 I got an error about the file (or was it device?) not existing, followed by a couple more errors.

However, today my boxed 8.2 pro turned up from Amazon, so I re-installed the kernel sources (well, told it to update them) then recompiled, but this time compiled into the kernel all the alsa options, along with the emu10k1 driver. I'd tried this before and it failed then, but I thought i'd give it a go, this time making use of the EXTRAVERSION in the makefile you mentioned (thats damn useful isn't it :) Thanks for telling me about that, will come in handy).

Anyway, I did all that, and rebooted, selecting the new kernel, and this time for some reason it worked fine!? :confused:
Sound is up and running, it's even accepting sound from my WinTV card (for the first time in my entire linux history)
So, a big thanks for all the assistance you've given me kev82, it's certainly taught me a few things for the future.
Thanks again