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In 0.8, at dlgawley's suggestion, I upgraded to the 2.6 kernel with the kernel-image-2.6.7-1-686-smp package and associated bits.

Attached is the raw dmesg output from the first boot.

• dmesg_26issues: First 2.6 boot dmesg output

See especially the section starting with PnPBIOS and also there may be issues with sound, although it seems to work ok so maybe that's a non-issue.

gpm doesn't start at boot - but it will start by hand. This breaks the mouse in X11. sigh, I hate mice.

williams.cscf refused to boot the 2.6 kernel. After much investigation by MikePatterson and SevernTsui (with input from LawrenceFolland), it turns out that the problem is a USB 2.0 7 in 1 card reader combined with newer BIOS releases on an Asus P4P800VM motherboard and a 2.6 kernel.

Current workarounds:

• disable USB 2.0 in the BIOS (actually, just changing USB 2.0 support from "HiSpeed" to "FullSpeed" seems to help - unttil today, 8 Nov, when upgrading an experimental box: kernel panics w/ 2.6.9 kernel at boot again! Had to re-disable USB 2.0 support - MikePatterson)
• unplug the card reader
• ??? perhaps 2.6.8 will fix this
• ??? perhaps Asus has some fix (but the beta BIOS release 06/08/2004 didn't fix it, but AlexRoman says he found a BIOS that does work)

Notes: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2004/03/msg14218.html describes issues with ACPI and USB in Debian.

I tried building my own kernel to rectify this.

First: williams:/usr/src/kernel-source-2.6.7# cp /boot/config-2.6.7-1-686-smp ./.config

then make oldconfig Then configure the kernel Old CPU default (despite -i686-smp) was PPro. So let's change that to P4. Support ACPI, but not APM. Let's not bother with PCMCMCMCMCIA support. Disable OHCI; lspci tells us our USB controller is UHCI and Claus Spitzer tells me that OHCI causes issues for him.

So, with config done: make-kpkg --append-to-version -uw-cscf --revision mpatters.0 binary modules_image

And let's see what happens... well, we got some debs, so install in following order:

williams:/usr/src# dpkg -i kernel-headers-2.6.7-uw-cscf_mpatters.0_i386.deb
williams:/usr/src# dpkg -i kernel-image-2.6.7-uw-cscf_mpatters.0_i386.deb

That didn't work out so well; it panicked trying to mount root. But I checked and ext2 and 3 support are enabled, and the GRUB rules are the same.

But IDE support seems to have been a module - doh! Build it in and try again with

make-kpkg --append-to-version -uw-cscf --revision mpatters.1 binary modules_image

19 Aug 2004 MikePatterson

Phil provided me with a PC that was standard in every respect except it has a serial ATA drive. SevernTsui had had issues with his SATA-equipped machine using the Debian 2.4 kernel; he fixed them by upgrading to 2.6, but we've got other IssuesWithKernel26.

First step is to try a 2.6 image on this machine. FC1 rescue disc won't see the filesystem (guess it has no SATA drivers). FC2's rescue disc (2.6 kernel) seems to lock up, just like Debian's kernel - how interesting. It sees the drive as /dev/sda1, but won't mount it automagically. (Maybe FC1 did as well?)

So:

# mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/sysimage
# grub
(now we're in grubby's cli)
grub# root (hd0,4)
grub# setup (hd0)

ie, these are the same steps we normally use to get grub going anyway. And grub works, hurray! And I also discovered it helps if you edit menu.lst to look in the right place for root.