|
Author: Keith Antoine kantoine@bigpond.net.au
This was done with help from members of the
user@lists.calderasystems.com
The exercise was to upgrade from eDesktop 2.4 to a linux
with KDE 2
Xfree4.0.1 and Kernel 2.4.0. Having been around for the 2.1
and 2.2
kernel upgrades I was prepared for trouble with libraries and
install
of the same.
Around the same time I had changed from SMP dual Celerons
running at 1100
mhz to a Duron of 650mhz overclocked to 850/900mhz. This was
because SMP
was not properly supported both in the kernel and by software,
some things
refused to run properly.The crucial part here was the Duron
and its
motherboard Asus A7V. Why? Because I did not realise that the
technology had changed in
the bios somewhat radically and I did not 'see" that, I 'knew'
what I was
doing when it came to the bios, didn't I!!
I had come back from Holidays, much advertised in the
Caldera lists, taken a
lot of pictures (digital) up the TNQ (Tropical North
Queensland) and I was going
to put them on the web page for downloads. When I got back
there was a disk
in the post 'Linux Technology Preview'. Oh Boy! this was going
to be fun and easy
way to get where I wanted to, that was 15th August, I just got
it all going
yesterday the 12th November. This was not the fault of LTP,
eDesktop 2.4,
the new kernel, libararies or the hardware. It was me and the
way I went about
it plus the deeper I got into it the harder it was to
recover.
Now I will not take you through all my mistakes etc but
suffice to say its far
easier to upgrade LTP than to go at it from eDesktop 2.4..
Half the battle is
won because a great many of the libraries are pre installed
with the LTP
install.
Members of the list must have got sick of me and my
questions, LTP would not
write a boot disk and it would not see the windows partition,
I could not upgrade
with rpms and kde2 was either not letting me login or doing
some other wierd things.Yes
I carried on with this for many weeks and did observe that it
might be h/w related, but
did not pursue that lead far enough. eDesktop 2.4 did install
well and saw the
windows partition and wrote the boot disk, but when I tried
upgrading I was in all types of
strife.
About 10 days ago I just stopped dead. I had a day off and
thought about what
I was doing and then decided that I would do it the old way
when I was in research
electronics, one brick at a time and a process of elimination.
Check all hardware in other machines,
all Aok. Errm, hang on the bios, nah, could not be that
nothing in the bios would cause what
I was getting. But we will check! I can say that I just did an
'set for optimal performance'
when I first setup and left it at that, oh no, I set the
drives to LBA, always for linux.
Well thats not so any longer, let me tell you.
The new Bios is 'looks' smaller and meaner but it isn't and
there are menus
with sub menus, but there are not so easily seen sub/sub
menus, about 4-5 layers in all.what
I did find was that there were selections I had not seen
enabled, like 'system performance
optimal' changed to normal, AC97 modem and AC97 audio needed
to be disabled, you now chosse
the Primary VGA Bios setting I had it to PCI had to change to
AGP, also disable scsi onboard
bios. But the real difference came when I changed from USER
TYPE HDD (for lba mode) to AUTO. I
was now able to install LTP and it saw the windows partition
and it wrote to the floppy disk now,
where it used to say there wasn't a drive available.
So now I had a level playing field at last, had a ltp that I
was able to
login to and get it to respond with normalacy. Now I had
learnt previously that it was best to
use LTP and upgrade that and also what I needed to upgrade to
and I had downloaded these previously.
You will need:
Get the latest from the site if later than one suggested
GNU C 2.7.2.3, this is already installed to forget it
GNU make 3.77 again already installed
binutils
2.1.0.25
ftp://ftp.valinux.com/pub/support/hjl/binutils/2.9.1/
util-linux
2.10o
ftp://ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/linux-local/utils/util-linux/
modutils
2.3.18
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/modutils/v2.3/
e2fsprogs
1.19
ftp://download.sourceforge.net/pub/sourceforge/e2fsprogs/
pcmcia-cs 3.1.21 ftp://pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net/pub/pcmcia-cs/
PPP 2.4.0 ftp://linuxcare.com.au/pub/ppp/
isdn4k-utils 3.1beta7 (I do not have a site for this)
rpm-3.0.6-6x.i386.rpm Try rpmfind...........
I did not upgrade pcmcia, PPP, irn isdnn4k-utils as I use
non of these. I
have also not u/g the e2fsprogs and not found any probs but
will do so soon.
As you can see there isn't a great deal to u/g if you use
LTP as a base.
However there are some gotchas in the way that u/g's are
installed. You will of course also need the
Col-2.4 files for kde2 and a d/l of the latest 2.4.0 kernel.
Now you are ready to go and the first
install is the MODUTILS, I had no problems here they used the
std ./configure, make and make install.
At everystage of installtion type in at an sued konsole
ldconfig -v to update the libs database and paths.
Next I installed kde2.
KDE2 suggested install::
Do the install from command line.
First up SUPPORT, I used rpm -Uhv --nodeps --force
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.rpm
Next qt2 all except qtdesigner. In fact do as I did and use
Pam Roberts
suggested install, then kdelibs, qtdesigner, kdeconfig and
kdedoc, kdebase then all others. use
ldconfig -v again and I rebooted too. It should come up fine
but some of your old programs many
not work now and some of the old kxxxx will not install as
they want qt 1.4 or qt2.1 beta 2
etc. They look for the 2.0 and 2.1 in qt2 and that is now
2.2.1 so you cannot have more than one qt2
to call. If its notqt based it will install and work, except
for some wine based programs, but
corel photopaint does. I have found since that some will
install depending on the libs you have so
long as you do the compile from /ROOT/KDE.
Now then comes the crunch time as the kernel installed is
2.4.0test3, I
wanted the latest and better working version so I d/l
2.4.0test10. Install from either command line or
startx and use xconfig. Do NOT use a kde gui screen and su or
even use root as I did and then had problems
on reboot as it would not go to runlevel 5 but dropped back to
3. I could not even login to kde from 3
either.
Now 2.4.0 kernels are far different and bigger, typically
90mb when
installed, so be very slow and careful with the configuration,
do not put something in because you MIGHT use
it. I could not get the cable online until I installed
Packet_socket and Socket_filter something I
had not needed in 2.4.0test8 so they are still including more
options. Now what i did was to compile the
kernel and write it to /boot then rebooted to see if it was
ok, then I did make modules and rebooted and
the make modules_install. This was where I had previously had
problems with it telling me that it was not an ELF file and
bombing out.
But it went ok and I could then login using the new
kernel.
So now I had LTP with Xfree 4,0.1 installed at the beginning
for me, Kernel
2.4.0test10 with all trimmings and kde2. Oh yeah I will update
the 2.4.0 kernel reccommended configs on the
step by step site as soon as I can.
So what next, rpms were not working via console or kpackage
and needed some
upgrades to libs too before they could be installed:: http://sources.redhat.com/bzip2/index.html
and d/l the
libbz2.so.1.0.0 and ln -s it to libbz2.so.0 it also complains
about libdb.so.2 so do as Douglas Hunley
suggests and mv it to .old and then d/l a copy of
libdb1-2.1.2.so form eDesktop 2.4 and link it to lbdb.so.2,
then
install rpm-3.0.6 which is on rpmfind.com also the devel file
with -Uhv --nodeps --force. Before doing this
the rpm icons looked like Netscape Navigator and were confused
after this they knew they were rpm
files. Now it is vital that after you install a new version of
RPM that you re-install KDE and KDE2 KDEADMIN and
also do a rpm --rebuilddb. This will then leave you with
kpackage complaining about not able to see
/usr/lib/rpm-3.0.3/rpmrc, so make a link from 3.0.6 to 3.0.3
and that will clear that. Its not vital to make the link as
kpage
will work anyway.
I also have GCC 2.8.1 and glib 1.2.8-4 plus glibc
2.1.95-2 and that will
bring me fully uptodate. GCC 1.2.8 and glib 1.2.8-4 went in
and run fine.
My burner runs using the same instructions for IDE on the
step site, however
I have not been able to compile sane-1.0.3 to run my scsi
scanner as yet.
LUCK, it really was worth it as far as I am concerned and am
wondering what I
am now going to do with my time.
Oh yeah I have about 200 pics to get up onsite.