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Upgrading Your Current System To Kernel 2.6
An anonymous reader writes "This white paper provides an overview of the process of moving an existing desktop system to the 2.6 kernel. It will highlight other software requirements imposed by the new kernel and administrative changes that you must make when migrating an existing system to the 2.6 kernel. It supplements previous whitepapers in the same series about Customizing the 2.6 kernel [Slashdot discussion here(1)] and porting drivers to the 2.6 kernel [Slashdot discussion here(2)] to the 2.6 kernel."
on Windows update?!? Where the heck is it?
I had all kinds of trouble upgrading to 2.6. Sound and networking didn't work, as well as some of my filesystems. Luckily, I'm smart enough to setup lilo to run multiple kernels, so going back to 2.4 was no trouble to tweak my config file and recompile and try again. I never got everything totally working right. I was going to just wait until the next series of distro releases solved these problems for me, but maybe I should give it another shot.
I'd like to see a nice up to date list distributions that are built around the 2.6 kernel. Trying to update a Mandrake system to 2.6 didn't work for me and these days I don't have the time to track down errors.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
The painful process of upgrading LVM1 to LVM2. Little documentation on the process, and installing Fedora Core 2 test 1 over an existing Fedora Core 1 gives all sorts of fun. Much hand-holding of your system and other hand-waving is required.
BSD^H^H^H2.4 kernel is dying.
Does anyone else have the same observation?
Speak truth to power.
With the preemptive kernel option enabled and the kernel module autoloader in 2.6 it does all you would ever need:
Loads any modules you need
Lets you do tasks preemtpively
Boots in a much shorter time (from 2.4.23's 35 sec to ~14 sec in my case)
It's also rock solid in my experience now, a good sound kernel choice that will fit virtually all workstations =)
...laptop touchpad don't bother going near 2.6 if you don't know exactly what you're doing. I still haven't got the mouse working. I can't even find anyone who can tell me how to confirm if the touchpad is a synaptic.
I'm not the only one suffering this.
Works great on my slackware desktop.
If there are, I didn't see them. All I did was:
apt-get install kernel-image-2.6.2-1-686
update-grub
Two lines on the command line and a reboot and I've been happy ever since.
Oh, wait, we're talking outside Debian. Nevermind.
H0ek
Think you're smart? Prove you've got brains!
I upgraded to the 2.6 kernel about a month ago, and have been nothing but impressed. I got increased speed, my sound works great (ALSA) and with 1280x1024 Framebuffer and Bootsplash (85Hz refresh no-less) even my console is nice to look at.
My NVidia drivers worked flawlessly with the new kernel, as well as my wireless network.
I get oooh's and ahhh's from the co-workers with 3DDesk, and my boss is impressed with my setup, even though he's got a shiny new G5 under his desk.
That's just my experience, though... YMMV
I'm on a chair.
The purpose of Linus et al is not to beat Microsoft. That's statedly incidental. The ultimate purpose is to make a free (as in both) OS which 'just works'.
To that end, sometimes things will have to be broken to improve. The alternative is to support legacy code till the end of days and end up with MS-like bloatware.
Jo(e) average user doesn't want, need, or expect to upgrade their running kernel. So who cares how hard it is?
Justin.
Built my 2.6 kernel, won't run (kpanic), don't care, waiting for Red Hat or whoever to do it for me.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
The term "white paper" is meaningless these days. Now that the marketing departments have gotten ahold of it, "white papers" are usually nothing more than the same information included in the colored brochures, only on a white piece of paper in black text.
The days of "white paper" meaning a strictly technical or educational document are gone. These days, "white papers" are just another form of advertising.
One thing that was a blocker for me to move to 2.6 was my mouse would go a lot faster while in X. I finally found that it was the new input system. Under 2.4 the default XF86Config file would have two mouse input settings, one for ps/2 and one for USB. Under 2.6 both of these were picked up regardless of the mouse being ps/2 or usb so all mouse events, clicks, etc were picked up twice. Removing one of the mouse entries made everything work as normal.
Probably everyone but me knew this, but thought I'd throw it out in case anyone else is in the same boat.
Here's my experience with 2.6 kernel (been running it since 2.6.0 was released).
DVDs look awesome. I had to tweak the hdparms for DMA, but they work great.
Ever since NVidia came out with the latest drivers, things like the UT2k4 Demo fun fantastic.
I was a little hung up on modules... seeing as I rarely use them, it wasn't a show-stopper. The conversion from modutils to module-init-tools was mostly painless.
Recently, I've been playing with MTD, and trying to get a test machine to use 12 out of the 16 megs of an AGP Voodoo3 3000 card's memory as a device I can format or use as swap. I have been unsuccessful. (2.6.3). This is also on a testing machine, not my "main" machine.
On a slightly OT note, planning on building a Mini ITX system with a Via Epia board (one of the 800 mhz ones). Should have the case this week, jury's still out on the mb.
Other than that, no complaints, it's been fantastic. I'm running 2.6.3 on 3 different machines (with different responsibilies) and it feels like there's no going back now!
FLR
I run gentoo on a dual pIII-600 with an ATI radeon7000 / SBlive / intelpro100. Kernels 2.4.18 through 2.4.22 took several hours of tweaking before I could even get the thing to boot correctly. ( 2.2 never had this problem )
Last week I took about 30 minutes and grabbed 2.6.3 did a clean/config/make, which took about the majority of that time, and booted into the fastest Linux box I have ever had.
2.6 booted with OpenGL without any tweaks pushing glgears to 1600fps and ALSA kicked in without errors on the emu10k1. Device drivers posed no issues for either the USB keyboard/mouse or hardrive or nework card.
No 'migration' was necessary for either windowmaker / enlightenment / blender / JACK or any of my other 100 some odd apps.
The one problem I can't seem to find the answer to is how Debian tells the kernel which modules to autoload at boot. I know that for 2.4 kernels, there is a list in /etc/modules. However, with my 2.6 kernel. that file is ignored and I have to manually load all the modules I need after boot. A pain in the ass since I try to keep most of my device drivers as modules, like for my NICs, video card, USB, sound card, etc. Has anyone using Debian and 2.6 kernel found a solution to this?
Sometimes I feel like a nut... Ok so it's most of the time
Fedora Core 1 forum posting with people who have already done it. It seems pretty easy from the looks of it. I'm going to do it just as soon as I get some free time...
And for the love of god, please read the whole thread. Don't ever install a kernel with rpm -Uvh. Leave yourself a backup (rpm -ivh).
Get Firefox!
Sure it is. It's just picky about who its friends are.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
emerge development-sources /usr/src/linux /usr/src/linux-2.6.3 /usr/src/linux /boot /boot/grub/grub.conf
rm
ln -s
mount
genkernel all
vi
reboot
That is ALL there is to it. It is pretty much the same as upgrading to any other kernel. The only trick I saw was that the kernel needs more parameters than 2.4. It needs "root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc real_root=/dev/hda?" appended, which kernel 2.4 did not need. All the other tools (module autoloaders, etc.) are already 2.6 ready on a Gentoo system
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I've tried all versions of 2.6 (2.6.1,2,3) but still get this problem. Everything seems smoother/more responsive except for a problem I have with a game (enemy territory). In 2.4 this game usually loads a map in 20-30 seconds. In 2.6 it takes about the same time but every map thereafter gets longer and longer, until they start taking several minutes. I did a test by launching my own server and just kept reloading the same map. 1st try 32 seconds, 5th try over 4 minutes. If anything it should be slightly quicker as some would be in memory/swap. The only other game I have in linux similar to enemy territory is quake3. It has the same normal load times in both 2.4 and 2.6, but it's maps are much smaller than enemy territory's so it doesn't stress the system as much. This leads me to believe that it's more a swap/memory issue than a graphics driver issue. I did hdparm tests and dma is enabled and I'm getting about the same speed in 2.4 as in 2.6. My system is a p4 1.6 with 128 megs ram gf4ti 4200. Now, I realize 128 megs is low these days, and would probably help aleviate this problem but it seems when a system is stressed in this way 2.4 performs better than 2.6. In 2.4 I can play on a server for as much as I want but with 2.6 I usually get kicked within a couple of new maps due to it timing out. Reconnecting to the server doesnt help, but quiting ET and restarting helps for that initial map, but then the cycle repeats. I don't see a way on this forum of attaching my config, I compiled the kernel myself and have gone over it several times to see if some option could be the cause of this. The first thing I tried was turning off the preemptive kernel option, but didn't help. My system is debian based (morphix distro) and as I mentioned I compile the kernel myself, not a precompiled kernel. I also made sure X doesn't have a negative nice value. You might suggest to throw more ram at the problem and even though it might help, I shouldn't have to as 2.4 seems to get by.
Advice? The first install is the worst. :-)
After that, debian gets much better -- my laptop has gone through three major debian releases (potato, woody, and now sid) using nothing more that apt-get commands. [Actually, I guess I'm not really qualified to comment on the debian install process since I haven't really installed it in the last three years -- I just keep updating the existing install.]
At the time I did the initial install of potato, the installer dumped you into dselect, which is confusing if you've never seen it before. It may be better now, but even if it isn't, you can always apt-get anything you forgot. And building your own kernel is a snap (get the sources from kernel.org, make xconfig to select what you want, make-kpkg clean, make-kpkg kerne_image modules_image, then dpkg -i to install your shiny new kernel.
I've also had good luck using alien to translate rpm->deb for the occasional time when I needed some software that wasn't available as a deb. YMMV. In a related vein, I've had good luck with the blackdown java debs (debian doesn't provide Java due to conflicts with Sun's license terms).
Overall, I've had fewer problems with Debian than I have with Red Hat (which I maintain for my employer) and Mandrake (which was my personal distro of choice before Debian). In particular, I find maintenance and bug-fixes much much easier (just run apt-get update, apt-get upgrade) and everything ``just works''.
Oh, and another problem I had was "Error: Unknown pseudo-op: `.incbin'" -- this was fixed by upgrading binutils to the latest version. Aside from these two problems, the upgrade went smoothly.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
The purpose of Linus et al is not to beat Microsoft. That's statedly incidental. The ultimate purpose is to make a free (as in both) OS which 'just works'.
Here on Slashdot, the purpose is to beat Microsoft.
I must live a charmed life, think pure thoughts or something, because my 2.6 experience has been nothing but positive.
My first experience was with a Compaq laptop, Slackware 9.0 and 2.6.0-test4. I found that I broke the 2.4 modutils when I upgraded to module-init-tools, but since 2.6 worked so well, I really didn't care. Oh, and I've never had any trouble with that crazy mouse touchpad thingy.
Slackware 9.1 says it's 2.6-ready, and it is. I've installed it on a number of systems and upgraded the kernel easily.
My current challenge is my Sun Ultra 5, which currently runs Debian (woody) with the 2.4.18 kernel it came with. I ended up building 64 bit SPARC gcc and friends as cross compilers on an x86 box. But hello world still doesn't link... :-(
...laura
As an aside, you can save yourself a lot of trouble in doing a fresh install with some intelligent partitioning. Most systems have an expert mode (or may offer nothing but expert mode, depending on the system) that lets you specify which partition corresponds to which mount point manually and decide which partitions should and should not be reformatted. If you set up /home on a separate partition, you can wipe everything else while leaving your user data alone. That can save you the trouble of having to restore all of your personal files when you install the new system. It's not necessarily perfect- some configuration files may change between versions of your favorite desktop environment, for instance- but it's a big improvement. You should obviously back up your data before doing the install just in case, but you should be doing periodic backups of your system already anyway.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
My setup - Debian on a Dell Inspiron 8100.
;)
:) With the addition of KDE 3.2 getting released this has been a really good upgrade and I would definitely recommend anyone else to do the same...
First of all the menuconfig menus are a lot more well organised and there are a lot more options, too. Configured it up and it booted OK... I've upgraded to every version so far. The good things:
* Much less work required with "external" device drivers. With 2.4 I had to separately compile ACPI, ALSA, the nVidia driver, PCMCIA and Lucent modem drivers. Now it's just the Lucent and nVidia drivers as the other three are now included already.
* ACPI support is better. Won't bore you with the details, but it is
* Everything's faster, although I was using the new scheduler stuff as a patch to 2.4 so it didn't make too much difference.
* probably lots of little things I can't think of right now
The bad things - there seem to have been a few nasty bugs, but that's to be expected with such a big upgrade and most of them have been sorted. Currently ACPI battery support is doing funny things and occasionally reporting that the battery's empty, when it's not. Give it a couple of releases though and it should be all good
cdrecord works with atapi burners now. (I make this blanket statement based only on the fact that I was able to burn a cd this morning).
The trick is:
cdrecord -scanbus dev=ATAPI
cdrecord dev=ATAPI:1,0,0 isname.iso
no boot time kernel options need to be passed (no more hdb=ide-scsi nonsense).
Good luck.
I don't know... I've installed Debian on about half a dozen different laptops now, each with horribly undocumented chipsets and lcd systems. Managed to get X working in each case. If you think getting XFree86 v 4.x is rough, man you have no idea how hard it used to be with XFree86 v 3.x! xf86config used to consistently produce completely useless modelines for 99% of all monitors, it used to take days sometimes to find a mode that barely worked just enough so you could run xvidtune and fix it. It took me about a good evenings worth of messing around to convert my Debian system to a 2.6 kernel, and I use ALSA sound, nForce2 motherboard, GeForceFX graphics, lots of bleeding-edge hardware so I always have to roll my own kernels from source. My tip: install GRUB as your bootloader, it will save your butt. Debian's not a simple system but it really rewards those who take the time to learn it. It just feels like an old-time big iron system. I really can't quantify it but when I use other distros they seem really lightweight to me. Don't expect to slap Debian on your box and be an expert with it in 45 minutes. Its a heavyweight OS for people who demand a bit more.
Clickety Click
"One thing about Debian that is NOT simple is the install! I never have gotten X to work under Debian, and I DID get it to work under Slackware, and even FreeBSD."
/etc/X11 and take a look at where all of these decisions were recorded.
Been there. Debian does install automatically on a FEW machines, particularly older machines that were popular and used "standard" components. I'm using a Dell GX1 that I got for $99.
Here s what I have done in the past when I got stuck without X-windows working...
Install Debian and go through the X-windows set-up process. Do the best you can at guessing your card information, refresh rates and whether or not to use framebuffers.
Locate the XF86Config(-4) file in
Now boot a copy of Knoppix (the bootable CD version of Linux), and, assuming it did a better job of setting up X-windows than you did, check the same settings for it (same location). Differences are likely to be in the horizontal and vertical refresh rates, the use of framebuffers, or the driver being used, also the list of module options such as "glx", "dri".
Surprisingly, X will fail to load properly even if your MOUSE settings are wrong. So you might have done everything right for video and gotten a trivial mouse parameter wrong and still have problems. (The systems DOES tell you this and tells you what log file to go read when this happens, but I remember being a bit intimidated by this process the first couple of times).
There are also some command line utilities you can run to straighten out your X setup, but I'm lazy and would rather just SEE that the system can work (using Knoppix, and then just copy what works.
Above process also works for diagnosing some network card and sound card problems.
Future versions of Debian will probably have better automatic device detection and configuration. In the mean time Knoppix (which is based on Debian) is a handy thing to have around.