Well, I got things sorted. I got them sorted quite a while ago, but I have just emerged from the cave of my Masters and I resolve to begin catching up on my blogging – I haven’t been hibernating, I just haven’t done any reporting on my activities.

Okay, back to the kernel – I went through the process again, and I still had USB issues, but everything else worked. I got a bit of help from TLUG and discovered that my problems went away if I typed sudo modprobe ehci_hcd and sudo modprobe uhci_hcd, which are the modules for USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 respectively. After a bit more looking, I found that the reason I had some old, unused modules loading was that they were in /etc/modules. So, I extrapolated, put the USB modules in and commented the obsoleted ones out, and Bob’s your uncle, everything works.

I figured it was high time I updated my desktop machine to a modern kernel. And, as usual there were some hiccoughs, but it seemed to go reasonably well with the following procedure:

cd /usr/src

tar xjfv linux.[version].tar.bz2

rm linux (assuming it is a link to your old kernel)

ln -s /usr/src/linux.[version] linux

cd /usr/src/linux

cp /usr/src/[oldkernel-source-directory]/.config .config

make oldconfig

make menuconfig

cd /usr/src/linux

make-kpkg clean

make-kpkg --append-to-version=.[a_unique_and_clever_name] kernel_image modules_image

cd /usr/src

dpkg -i kernel-image-[version].[a_unique_and_clever_name]_10.00.Custom386.deb

vi /etc/lilo.conf

lilo

What gave me troubles was using ALSA instead of OSS as the sound architecture. It worked, after following instructions to install a few things, if I was root. I don’t always want to be root though, and nothing I tried seemed to work. Finally, I used the brute force approach. I went into /dev and went to town, chmoding everything in sight, including mixer, sequencer, dsp, music and the snd directory, as well as the entire contents of /dev/snd. It works now though, so that’s something.

Well, things didn’t go as well as I thought they did. I noticed that when I was loading the modules on my new kernel that the computer threw a number of FATAL errors, which I took to be a bad thing. More importantly, however, was that I could no longer mount my USB key – I got errors about /dev/sda not being a valid block device. Well that won’t do, so I compiled another kernel and booted into that. Then I had more problems – the USB key still didn’t work, sound software began whining about permissions-related issues and then, for no reason, my mouse stopped working. So I booted back into the previous kernel, and the mouse still didn’t work. I’ve had to go all the way back to my 2.4.18 kernel to get the mouse working again. Very annoying. I am not the only person around, I suspect, who thinks that you should be able to upgrade and have everything still work. Yes, the new kernel is very different, but you should not have to worry about the baby in the bathwater when you upgrade, you just shouldn’t.