The Ghost of Gooch (or why devfs grokked my Sarge to Etch upgrade)
I had a need to get OpenOffice 2.0 on my main workstation. This PC had
been happily running 'Sarge' for at least 2 years.
I read several 'Sarge to Etch' howto's, (no problems encountered - of
course!) backed up to tape and ran apt-get update, apt-get
dist-upgrade. I was on kernel 2.6.8-2-686, and this is where my issue
starts.
apt-get warned of several package issues with xorg and some libs but
went forward to completion. Before rebooting I chose to install
linux-2.6.16.2. It appeared to install all of the correct modules,
sysutils, and libs but when I finally did reboot, kernel 2.6.16.2
started to boot but stopped in the middle of setting up devices. The
one error message I kind of saw said that /dev/hda3 (my root device)
could not be found. Then initramfs/busybox halted the init and it just
sat there. I had a shell but no prompt and no access to the drives.
This machine has /boot and /root on primary partitions in ext3 and the
rest of the partitions in lvm in xfs. The loader is grub.
I then punched it out and chose my old Sarge kernel. init complained
about udev not being supported on kernel_blah < 2.6.15 and the hair on
the back of my neck stood up!
of course, I do not have a dmesg from this attempt because the root
device was never accessed.
I had some bad experience with devfs and initrd a couple of years ago
and solved it by rolling my own non-initrd/non-devfs kernels. But Sarge
had run so good I saw no need to goof with it. I hated devfs though,
the naming scheme sucked and it always felt like there was a lot going
on behind the PC cover I did not understand.
Well, kernel 2.6.8 did boot but xorg would not start due to no mouse
device. I finally loaded a couple of mouse drivers via insmod out of
/lib/modules and was able to get xorg to start. As a plus I commend
those involved with moving the config files from one distribution to
another as xorg and KDE started right up after I loaded a mouse driver.
So, my question; is there a method to get udev to replace devfs so I can
solve my module loading problem? This thing is running kind of cobby
and I would hate like heck to re-install.
Thank You,
Michael
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