I'm hoping to keep this note shorter than the last one, but if I
provide even a little detail on my troubles (and now partial
successes), I fear it will quickly grow longer than the last post.
Worst, I don't know if anyone cares, so I'll try and keep it succinct,
and I'll post more if others are having similar troubles.
First, Curt Howland gets my undying gratitude for (again :-) urging me
to try Knoppix (to recap, Lindows Live did not recognize my drives,
and Xandros did, but is a little too brittle for what I want on this
machine). Knoppix booted cleanly, recognized everything, and
all-in-all impressed the heck out of me!
Next, my "initrd" problem was solved by _removing_ the initrd. I
rebuilt the kernel with reiserfs (and ext3) support in the kernel
instead of as modules, and dropped the initrd line in lilo, and much
to my surprise, the machine booted. This is a 2.6.5 kernel, downloaded
from kernels.org.
Unfortunately, "dist-upgrade" and building the kernel were among the
most painful computer experiences I've had. The machine hung multiple
times (while I was in KDE), and when I continued in single user mode,
it continued, but least I saw the error messages. They rotated between
segfaults in gcc, "broken pipe(s)" in dpkg, processor faults, and DMA
faults.
To cut to the chase, I turned off Hyperthreading in the bios, built a
non-smp kernel, and turned off DMA support in that kernel (the
specific DMA support for my controller, the Promise PDC20265).
This gave me a relatively stable machine. Unfortunately, sound is
currently broken. A few googles later, I know exactly what it wrong,
but all attempts to fix it as yet have failed. Since that is a lower
(but still important) priority for me, I've bagged working on it for
other tasks. Essentially, I have an on-board Intel I810 chip, and
Knoppix 3.3 (kernel 2.4.24-xfs) finds it and loads the i810_audio
module. In the newer kernels, that support seems to be under ALSA, and
is called snd-intel8x0, but while that built and is on my system, it
doesn't auto load, and I can't seem to insmod it either, because it's
a ".o", not a ".ko" like the newer kernels want/expect. Back to that
next week :-)
After I had a stable 2.6.5 system, I checked the sid repository and
noticed the the 2.6.5 kernels had shown up (I don't know how
recently). They have 686, with and without smp support, obviously with
initrd images as well. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven, thinking
that I could download those images and with the smp one, even turn on
hyperthreading again. No joy, as both kernels panic on me very early
in the boot process, telling me that they don't know the fs-type of my
root system (which happens to be reiserfs). I then downloaded the
kernel sources from sid, ensured that ext3 and reiserfs were both
built into the kernel, and got the same error. I felt that I had
wasted a couple of hours on that, so I moved back to "more important"
tasks...
So, I'm back to my own hand-rolled kernel, no hyperthreading and no
DMA, and it seems to be pretty darn stable all day today. My plan now
is to simply work on it as normal, as a user, getting my environment
set up, and then when Knoppix 3.4 comes out (which has an option of
booting with the 2.6.5 kernel, and it has KDE 3.2.2), I'll download
that, and use it to reinstall the system (since I presume that it will
autodetect everything correctly, likely including the
smp/hyperthreading stuff as well!). It can't come out soon enough for
my taste :-).
Lastly, I am writing this from Thunderbird, on my new machine, having
successfully copied over 853MB of files from my Windows laptop. With a
few minor edits to "prefs.js" in the profile directory of Thunderbird,
it all "just worked", including _all_ of my email account settings
(7)!. This made me _extremely_ happy that I switched from Outlook to
Thunderbird about 6 months ago on Windows (where that migration was
simple), since there was _zero_ pain in coming over to linux having
done that before. I had also switched to Firebird/Firefox over a year
ago on Windows, and I'm using Firefox on the new box too...
I also have Psi running for my IM needs (same app I used on Windows),
so I'm set up in the most "basic" sense of that. This can now be my
"default" machine, while I slowly bring over all of my other critical
apps/data. In the meantime, at least my email, browsing and IM'ing are
now on the new box, and those are the three things I do most on my laptop.
One _stupid_ question. When I log in as root under KDE, I get a
default environment that I like (in terms of which apps have icons on
the bottom left of the screen, etc.). When I log in as me, I get
Knoppix defaults (not kde defaults), and there are fewer apps). I have
no idea what files control that, and I would like to copy over the one
that controls root's login to my home directory. Any pointers would be
appreciated.
Whew. Thanks again to everyone who tried to help, and here's to
Knoppix in general, and big wish that they speed up the production of
the downloads for 3.4.
P.S. They supposedly gave out 40,000 CDs of 3.4 at Cebit. I don't
understand why they couldn't just "dd" that CD and put it on the
mirrors as the iso image, but what do I know :-).
