I think what happened is that the power supply unit (”Netzteil”) died. Claudia called on Wednesday saying that the computer smelt of burned plastic. When I arrived, I opened it all up, tried to locate the smell, removed the power supply unit, aired the room, and waited. The smell disappeared. Then I considered: 600MHz, 128MB RAM, no DVD burner... I was considering a new PC for quite some time. And I decided that this was the sign I needed. So I tried to order something like the system I wrote about on 2004-09-30. It turned out they only assemble systems on demand and take one to two weeks. No way! So I decided to buy all the parts and assemble a new computer myself:
Started to assemble, then considered how I wanted to handle the IDE situation: Four drives can be attached, and I had the old CD burner, another 120GB Maxtor, and older 13GB Seagate, and a very old 2GB Quantum Fireball (with the root filesystem). And now I had two new drives... I quickly decided that I wanted all six drives, even if I only connected four of them, since I wanted to be prepared for failures so that all I needed to do was juggle some cables. I remember my mental pain when I discovered that I cannot read another CD when I boot Knoppix (from CD), for example.
So I connected all the old drives, tested it. Basically worked from Knoppix! Formatted the new drive, and copied the root filesystem from the very old 2GB disk to the new 120GB disk. Juggled with the cables again, and tried to boot.
I had to run grub again, because my grub stuff was elsewhere, now.
grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/hdb1 /dev/hda
Then I noticed that X didn’t run anymore. I had switched card from my old NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 to the new onboard thingy – a _SiS _Real256E. Right. I tried to do the right thing:
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86
Switched driver from nv to sis, changed the name, klicked through the rest – but my _etc_X11/XF86Config-4 remained unchanged! Weird. I tried several times, but to no effect. dpkg-reconfigure remembered the settings I had provided, but the file was not changed. I even creaded the md5sum file as recommended. No go. Oh well, I changed the file by hand.
Next I noticed that the network was not working. I had switched from my old Tulip card to the new onboard thingy – a VIA 6103L LAN PHY that comes with a !SiS963L... And my network was down. udhcpc just was not able to get a lease. So I grepped the Kconfig file in the drivers/net directory of the kernel sources for VIA and found a reference to something: The sis900 module. Tried to insmod it, but got the error that “the file was not found”. Huh!? modprobe worked after several tries – had to rmmod, look again, backtrack... But then it worked. But the network was still down. Then I remembered rule number one of cable modems: When in doubt, reboot the modem. So I pulled the plug, waited, plugged it back in, waited some more... And as you can see, I’m back online. :D Turns out that it was not necessary to add sis900 to _etc_modules. Good.
I recommend Knoppix as a rescue system. ;) I use “fb800x600 2” to boot...
Sound seems to work as well. This is so incredibly amazing. I still remember the hassle I had ages ago. The hotplug system or whatever is installing the right modules is awesome. (And for whom a working sound card is just business as usual, take this as evidence of my advanced age... ;)) The strange thing is that I had to plug it into the Microphone (pink) jack. Did I mess up the jumpers? The motherboard manual says that in 6-channel mode, the pink jack is for rear speaker out... But I don’t think I activated 6-channel mode via the jumpers. I *did* touch them, however, so you never know. Argh!
As to the CD/DVD burner: I was sure that I tried this before, but after the last reboot this seems to suddenly work:
growisofs -Z /dev/hdc -R -J /home
I think this uses 8× speed, whereas these discs I have here are 1-4×, 4.7GB (single sided) – I guess I should burn at -speed=1 and check... But it works!
USB seems to work as well, just downloaded a picture from the camera. Yihaa! I think it is time to finally eat something. 😄
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
⁂
thanks for the detail.
i haven’t upgraded to slackware-10, so can’t recommend it. but i have warm feelings for slackware-9.1. i always install a minimal system (no emacs, just twm), then build ratpoison and emacs if necessary (usually they are on another partition to be mounted after initial install).
your 2GB Quantum Fireball should do nicely, though a similar sized partition on a faster new drive might be better. i’ve never hit 1.5GB. as soon as i’m done installing, i mount a pre-existing *home partition (which then makes the original installation look like the tip of the iceberg). all my critical stuff (emacs, perl, ratpoison, ssmtp) is installed to my home directory, as is a mirror of etc. so within an hour from start of installation, i’ve restored etc from my home directory and am running emacs, ratpoison et al from home directory.*
of course LFS is most desirable, but you can try slackware-9.1 without committing much time. say sayonara to apt-get! of course, you could keep debian on another partition and boot to it to quickly apt-get new software for trial purposes. then back to slackware and install manually if the new software deserves it.
last night i reinstalled to get some data for you. using expert mode to select any package i can ever imagine wanting, df shows 899K blocks used. if i didn’t select packages i don’t expect to need, size would be close to 500K blocks. total install time was < 1 hour. the only tweaking necessary was for cdrw (changing symlink to point to scd0 rather than hdc, and adding append=”hdc=ide-scsi” to lilo boot options). SIS chips auto-detected on my ASUS motherboard are SIS900, SIS651, SIS5513, and SIS USB 2.0 controller.
i won’t bug you anymore about it. i know you are a busy guy, since you are in pre-Lin Yutang mode.
– GregScott 2004-10-30 14:26 UTC
---
Cool! It really seems to be interesting. How do you get security updates for slackware?
– Alex Schroeder 2004-10-31 21:51 UTC
---
i don’t keep up with http://www.slackware.com/security/ very well, yet i’ve never had a problem attributable to poor security; and i’ve been around quite awhile (50 year old dinosaur) – on cable modem since 1999. of course if i read about a security problem, like the recent one in FX-1.0PR, i upgrade (actually i build cvs FX by script every prime-numbered day). i have always run a firewall; iptables currently. and my US$50 router (D-link DI-604) assigns private ip addr’s to my aging family of PC’s. all my passwords are encrypted, i run few servers, check ps output, blah blah. no one is immune, but i’ve been OK so far.
http://www.slackware.com/security/
on another topic, i saw a rave about vectorlinux on slashdot yesterday. since i was urging you to try slackware (ultimately LFS), i tried it out. yuck! it didn’t give me as much control over installation as i’m used to, and ended up way bigger than an “expert” install of slackware-9.1. don’t let the designation “expert” throw you – it would be the proverbial walk in the park for you.
if you haven’t already done so, get emacs, ratpoison (or whatever wm you like these days), perl, ssmtp, installed to your $HOME. mirror your _etc to an archive in $HOME. then install slackware-9.1 to a sandbox partition. like i said, my installation ranges from 499-899K blocks, depending on mood (minimalist to promiscuous). i make a boot floppy, reboot after initial install, restore etc from old $HOME, set usr_bin/perl to point to $HOME/. the restored fstab includes a mount to old $HOME. reboot and everything is comfy, with familiar cvs emacs. ratpoison, perl, ssmtp. forgive the repetition, but the only tweaking necessary on my system was with the cdrw.
i know you are much more active than i am (ex. your recent dvd mastering), so it’s understandable you would keep debian around to quickly try out new software. but i would be surprised if you didn’t like slackware, based on what i’ve absorbed from your writing over the last year or so. if you conclude it stinks, i won’t hold it against you. haha. (dinosaur smiley).
– GregScott 2004-10-31 23:23 UTC
---
I must confess that I am afraid of getting started on something like that. I fear to waste hours on tinkering... Maybe I should repartition the new harddisk and start experimenting... Hm.
– Alex Schroeder 2004-11-01 03:12 UTC