Back on 2.6
Warning! Long geeky entry follows!
As I mentioned a while ago, I’m having troubles with my laptop. Basically, the screen sometimes fails to work. Fortunately, the VGA out on the back still works, and if I run for a while with a monitor hooked up, then the screen will work again when I reboot. However, not if I run Windows. I booted into windows to try and play a game, and the screen didn’t work, and continued to not work for hours. Very painful. The upshot of this is that I decided to take Windows off my laptop entirely, and reclaim that 4 GB of space. This involved a reload of Linux, because I hadn’t started using LVM yet when I loaded it.
My first attempt at a reload involved attempting to go straight to 2.6, with a root on LVM. This failed miserably. So, I instead loaded with 2.4 and a real root rather than an LVM root. I can always move to an LVM root later, if I want, as that’s one of the beauties of LVM.
First, I loaded onto an LVM1 setup, with a stock Gentoo kernel, which only supports LVM1. Then, I tried to boot 2.6, and had troubles, not the least of which is that 2.6 only supports LVM2. So, I patched my 2.4 kernel with LVM2 and device mapper, and switched to that. I could then try 2.6 to my hearts content, without worrying about LVM tool problem.
My main problem with 2.6 was that it was oops-looping at boot, so fast that I couldn’t tell what it was that was oopsing. I tried building without the usual candidates, namely APIC and ACPI (wow, those four letters are annoying… Together, those two components have cause more headache for people upgrading to 2.6 than any other parts of the system), but it still oops-looped.
Long story short, (okay, still long, but at least shorter), I managed to make out “isa-pnp” in the mess of furiously scrolling text on the screen, and took that out. Finally, it works!
My previous 2.[56] experiences started at 2.5.56 or so, and continued on from there, so I had no real compareson of 2.4 and 2.6 on the same hardware. Now that I’m running 2.6 and ran 2.4 for the past week on the same hardware, I realize what an improvement in feel 2.6 is over 2.4. I’m really glad I got back to 2.6.
