BeigeJournal

Since Saturday was a bit cool and cloudy and I was feeling a bit tired, perhaps from the three days of bicycle commuting plus a few hours of kayaking an Friday, I somehow decided to mess with a perfectly functional computer. I have RedHat 9 on a Pentium 3, and I upgraded from 2.4.whatever to the 2.6.5 kernel.

I got some very good advice from web pages by Gil Thomer, as well as Nick Warne and Jeremy. Make all the many minor changes to the startup files that they recommend.

The new “make xconfig” is nice. You use “make bzImage” to build the kernel, and you apparently need to use “make modules” to build any modules, which no one seems to have mentioned. “make modules_install” will install the modules, but you then need to use “depmod” in your /var/modules/version directory manually, apparently.

The ALSA sound stuff has changed a bit, so you need to run MAKEDEV.snd in the kernel sources “scripts” directory to update the device links.

I’m used to LILO, but RedHat uses GRUB, which is even easier since you don’t have to run anything after editing /etc/grub.conf, which is hard for us old LILO people to get used to.

If you want to use the new ide-cd interface for CD burners with cdrecord you’ll need the latest version of cdrecord. “cdrecord -dev=ATAPI -scanbus” will find the device using the ATAPI interface scheme. I ended up with a /etc/defaults/cdrecord with the line “CDR_DEVICE=ATAPI:0,0” in it to specify the device as a default. It does seem to work. Note that cdrtools wants to put everything in /opt/schily, which might not be what you expected. Edit DEFAULTS/Defaults.linux to change that.

I’m sure I’ll find other things that broke, but I think most everything is working now. It wasn’t too hard.

Update: Chrony had to be updated to 1.20. Also, something related to PAM broke, so the xlock functionality of xscreensaver screws up X.