« I posted this from BloGTK | Main | The battle known as suse 9.0 »

December 06, 2003

My Adventures With The 2.6 Test Kernel

Okay, so I've heard all of these great things about the 2.6 kernel that should be coming out sometime by either the end of this year or the very early part of next year. Last night, I decided to download it and see if I can make it work.

For those that aren't aware, I use Fedora, which used to be Red Hat Linux. There is a test kernel RPM located on the Red Hat Web site designed for Red Hat 9 and Fedora, so I thought I would download and install it to see what the new kernel was like.

Upon boot, I really didn't notice anything different until it got to the point where it normally detects my USB devices. It came back with an error. Next up was the configuration for my network card and printer. I told it to remove the existing configuration for both and to add a new configuration for the network card. I guess since the new kernel didn't detect any USB devices, the printer wasn't going to be re-detected.

So, I get into the command prompt and login as root and edited the XF86Config file so that it used the generic Nvidia driver since I didn't feel like re-installing the driver for the new kernel. I started X and sure enough, my mouse wouldn't work. I couldn't even get it to connect to the base station (it's wireless) when I hit the connect button at the bottom of the mouse. Usually a green "connect" light appears, but it didn't happen in this case.

Okay, so the USB part was bad ... no problem. I'm a keyboard power user, so I thought that I would open up a terminal and get Firebird loaded to find out what the USB problem was. I get Firebird loaded properly, but it doesn't see a network connection.

Starting to get frustrated, I start the redhat-config-network program to see what the problem was. Interestingly enough, it appears that my machine thought it had two NICs, and neither was activated. I activated ETH0 and did a few pings to Yahoo to make sure that I was on the Internet ... which I received return pings.

So, I opened Firebird back up and tried to hit yahoo.com to see if the rest of the network settings were working properly. No dice. Seems that nothing could get in or out on port 80, so I decided to look and see if there was a firewall on somewhere that I wasn't aware of. Sure enough, a firewall was on ... so I turned it off. Still no dice.

Since 1) I didn't have USB and 2) I couldn't get out on the Internet, I decided to give up on the 2.6 test kernel. I'm sure that I could download it from kernel.org and set it up myself ... but my biggest problem with that right now is that the 2.6 kernel configuration is WAY different than what I've used in the past. It almost seems harder than what it used to be. What's even worse, none of the Kernel How-To's are up to date and some are not even online. I guess those are the ones that are being updated to the 2.6 kernel way of thinking.

I guess I'm just going to have to wait for Fedora Core 2 to come out so I can enjoy the new features of 2.6.

Posted by ed at December 6, 2003 04:04 PM

Comments

Post a comment