Complete kernel crash [Was: Re: dpkg failure trying to changeownership of a symlink ...]

[Nikhil Nair <nn201@cus.cam.ac.uk>]

Hi,

Ian, thanks for your help.  I had dpkg 1.4.0.31 and libc6.1 2.1.3-10, so
both newer than the lchown change (that happened at dpkg 1.4.0.25,
according to the changelog).

My kernel was ancient: 2.0.34.  So I grabbed the source for 2.2.17pre6
from the source directory, built it and rebooted - and got a complete and
utter crash.

Any ideas?  I'm afraid I used to be competent at this sort of thing, but
I'm long out of practice.  My milo is from kernel 2.0.30, which could be a
problem - could it?  I didn't apply any patches at all - I just took the
.orig.tar.gz file; could that be the trouble?  (I take it there aren't any
separate alpha patches any more ...).

This is what happened:  when I did a shutdown -r, it crashed when jumping
to the kernel.  When rebooting through milo, milo kept rerunning itself,
and I never got to the kernel ...

Oh, my 2.0.34 kernel with new dpkg/libc is also doing some very odd
things, like the date is 1970, and I've been getting lots of messages
starting `<sc' (but that isn't dpkg/libc, as I've been getting them for a
while ...).

Any help here much appreciated ...

Thanks,

Nikhil.

+--------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Nikhil Nair                    |                                 |
| Department of Chemistry        | Tel.:  +44 1223 336350 (lab)    |
| University Chemical Laboratory |        +44 1223 368353 (home)   |
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| CB2 1EW                        |                                 |
| England                        |                                 |
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