• 2004
  • October
  • 14
  • Bleep, that's not what was supposed to happen (What should have been a trivial install of common hardware winds up screwing up core functionality...)

Bleep, that's not what was supposed to happen (What should have been a trivial install of common hardware winds up screwing up core functionality...)
Written by on in Snaking.


Well, I spent about 1.5 hours working on getting the new TV card working (about 1/2 hour longer than I'd intended). Unfortunately, to do that I needed to recompile my kernel (gods what a stupid system that is, honestly), and something wound up upsetting the magic that let the tablet work. Have spent almost 4 hours trying to recover the incantation.

The problem is even messing up the USB keyboard pretty badly. There's no difference between the kernel config files (before/after) either, that's just so annoying.

Blah. My intention was just to pop the dratted card in before I went to bed, load MythTV, and let Rose record some TV shows tomorrow when she got home from school. Instead I've stayed up until 6am trying to get my workstation back to a working configuration (and become rather frustrated and tense in the process) so I can do bug-hunting tomorrow.

Worst part is that I knew I should have left it for the weekend. I knew that, despite all the "oh, it's trivial to install" comments that any Linux hardware install is going to eat half a day and have a 50/50 chance of pooching the whole system. Overconfidence (and stupidity), thy name is Mike.

Anyway, must sleep. There's still a memory leak (though it's slightly slower still), and the evil bug and a few features are still waiting. May have to boot into Windows to do the work tomorrow.

Comments

  1. x

    x on 10/14/2004 10:11 p.m. #


    I've been somewhat wiped out today. That sore thoat of yesterday moved to my head. <br />
    <br />
    Anyhow... my major linux frustration is lack of any kind of suspend/resume (ie. hibernate, or standby). This annoys me to such an extent that if there was any practical way for me to move back to windows, i'd do that just for the fast and mostly flawless suspend/resume. <br />
    <br />
    But weirdly enough, getting the software I like to run to run on windows is such a pain that I just can't move back to windows. Unix has better software for me (i mean besides my mostly beloved KDE environment). Yeah, so "software" is keeping me banging my head against Gentoo at this point. Strange, strange, strange. <br />
    <br />
    Anyhow, decided today to start with a shiny new generic kernel and see if i could get anything to work with it, even if all my other devices don't work. If it didn't work, i was going to start working backwards in kernel releases... because this used to work!<br />
    <br />
    So anyhow, loaded up 2.6.9-rc4-mm1 ... acpi sleep still doesn't work. But i found that the newer (but branded unstable) /sys/power/state interface does work for hibernate. Fairly exciting (in a sad way). This is the new interface which i believe is supposed to supplant the old one eventually after it is tested more. Unfortunately the KDE laptop applet doesn't support the new interface, so i have to manipulate it manually.... but... if it works... i'll stick with it. It's a very important feature for me.<br />
    <br />
    So i am slowly compiling more hardware/driver support as I find i need it, and keeping old .config files handy if hibernate breaks. <br />
    <br />
    Have found the internal wireless card seems to have no hope on 2.6.9 kernel. Some acpi resume data structure seems to have changed sizes. )-: Sigh. Oh well, i'll go back to trying my external pcmcia card and wait for the driver/kernel for the built-in one to catch up *again*. <br />
    <br />
    Wonder if sound works... bah, i'm not even going to try!<br />
    <br />

Comments are closed.

Pingbacks

Pingbacks are closed.