Re: Potato woes

[Michael Stroucken <stroucki@master.debian.org>]

On Fri, 23 Apr 1999, Giuliano P Procida wrote:

> I upgraded a fairly fresh install of Slink to Potato (of about 16 hours
> ago). Since then the system has gone mad (seemingly random dates within
> 1970 are reported). I don't think this is a problem with the date command
> as pppd also reports negative times and generally fails to work. I'm
> using the 2.0.36 jensen kernel from the CD.

	This is what I went through for about a week. I compiled a 2.2.3
minimal kernel, no modules and the systems date was screwed up, I got
multiple segfaults from the init scripts and eventually the system would
hang. Trying to upgrade packages led to everything dying because of the
lchown function call which apparently only correctly works in 2.2. Thanks
to Bart's help, I was able to force install of certain packages such as
apt, bash and a few others, but the system time was always screwed up
under the newly installed libs. Out of experimenting, I tried booting the
2.2.3 kernel I had compiled under 2.0.35 and the system came up cleanly!
Installing the rest of the potato debs was a snap, except for the modem
downloads :).

> 
> Moving to a 2.2.6 kernel seems to fix the date problems but due to
> multiple oopses 2.2.6 is unusable. In fact, I'll only use it to get a
> working PPP when I need to download some more .debs.

	I have two days ago compiled 2.2.6, and everything worked. Where
do you see the oopses happening? Right now the only issue I have is with
Plug and Pray in the kernel. It is really sparsely documented, and my
soundcard still needs isapnptools to configure. But after the despair I
had in upgrading I am very happy right now. The transition from 1.2 to 2.0
was about as painful, but at least I could install from scratch. Not an
option with debian-alpha yet since there aren't any bootdisks out yet. But
that's just one of the dangers of living on the edge.

Greetings,
Michael.