Long-winded, frustrated technical post alert. Sorry, but sometimes I need to rant about geek things. (At least this one’s not trite, ey Katie?)<\/p>\n
I forgot just how much of a PITA it is to update my kernel. I run Gentoo linux on my desktop at the moment, and decided recently, on Jon’s urging, that it would probably be a good idea to get it back up to date. Sounded easy, especially when he suggested just nice’ing “emerge -u world” in the background, so I decided to start doing that this afternoon. Well, unfortunately there’s a bit<\/em> more to it than that. Seeing as I have 342<\/strong> packages to upgrade (all to be recompiled from source, since Gentoo is a source-based distro), I get interrupted about every 20 packages with some problem to sort out the portage can’t handle automatically. First it was mysql. Can’t autoupgrade from 4.0.24 to 4.1.14. So, following a handy wiki, I had to first upgrade to 4.0.25, then backup and delete all my settings, then remove 4.0.25 completely<\/strong>, then install 4.1.14, then replace all my settings. Took like 20 minutes of manual intervention. Not a huge deal. Rolling further along. This package wants me to delete some directory<\/strong>, so the thing dies, then that package has an illegal \/usr dynamic library link<\/strong> (???), so unmerge it manually, then I get to hal (Hardware Abstraction Layer). Turns out hal needs a kernel upgrade<\/strong>. Shit<\/em>.<\/p>\n So I emerge gentoo-sources to get 2.6.14. No big deal. Copy over my old .config, update the new settings as needed, give it a quick once-over to make sure everything is still ok. Looks good. Compile that, mount my suse boot partition (since that’s where my bootloader actually is), copy the System.map and vmlinuz files over there, update grub\/menu.lst, then reboot. Big mistake.<\/strong> I forgot in the heat of the moment that my motherboard has a network chip that’s not supported by the standard kernel sources. (There’s a driver in development at version 0.9, but the author says it’s still buggy…) Plus, NVIDIA’s custom kernel module dies every time you recompile, so I get uncermoniously dumped<\/strong> at a console full of module loading errors. Great. Cue 45 minutes of reboot<\/strong>ing into SuSE, downloading the updated, nasty kernel module from SysKonnect, reboot<\/strong>ing into the console of errors, patching my kernel tree, make modules && make modules_install, modprobe sk98lin, oops that didn’t work because the retarded non-functional default sk98lin tried to load already and died… reboot<\/strong>, readd \/etc\/init.d\/net.eth0 to my startup scripts, reboot<\/strong>, finally on the net, now download & install updated nvidia drivers, reboot<\/strong>.<\/p>\n X finally comes up and lo-and-behold my entire GUI environment is dead<\/strong>. Seems portage thought it’d be a great idea to emerge parts<\/em> of gnome 2.12 before hal (the package that caused this whole mess), so now I can’t reload gnome until everything is done updating. At the current moment, it’s compiling #6 of 243 remaining packages. Splendid.<\/strong><\/p>\n If you actually read that this far, I hope you’re sleeping happier than I, and less fitfully than my poor computer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Long-winded, frustrated technical post alert. Sorry, but sometimes I need to rant about geek things. (At least this one’s not trite, ey Katie?) I forgot just how much of a PITA it is to update my kernel. I run Gentoo linux on my desktop at the moment, and decided recently, on Jon’s urging, that it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1865,"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions\/1865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}