tracking a system upgrade.....
Hans,
I can understand your frustration with the situation of setting up your
modem. Being a new user of Linux myself (3 months), I have faced several of
these problems. The documentation isn't all that great, and usually not
up-to-date (some still talk about the conf.modules file, instead of the
modules.conf file). The other day I saw a friend upgrade his system from
slink to potato. He has been using the potato kernel for a while now, but
the rest of his system had fallen behind. It took him 5 hours to do the
upgrade over an ethernet connection. He spent most of his time figuring out
the dependency problems and rooting out obsoleted files that resulted from
the system upgrade.
I know that the file organization of slink and potato are different
(conf.modules Vs. modules.conf being one example). By organization I mean
both the name of the files and their locations. The difference isn't
appalling, but it isn't trivial either. However, I didn't see any package
that would resolve these differences. I am sure my friend has lots of
unwanted files lying around. I haven't been following the development of
woody, but I am hoping that the basic file organization is different from
potato only in terms of new files that have been added, and the files used
in potato have not been renamed or moved in woody.
Does anybody know of a way to compare one's system with a freshly installed
system running the same release. For e.g., is it possible to compare the
file organization on a system that has recently had a massive upgrade from
previous release (like slink) to a current release (potato) with the file
organization on another system that has a freshly installed current release
(potato). In short, what's the difference between SLINK --> POTATO and
freshly installed POTATO.
Thank you,
Andy Saxena
----- Original Message -----
From: "Hans" <hansfong@zonnet.nl>
To: <debian-laptop@lists.debian.org>
Sent: Friday, September 01, 2000 4:20 PM
Subject: pcmcia modem woes
> Hello all,
>
> I've got a Dynalink 1456VQC cardmodem with my Acer Travelmate 512T,
running
> Potato freshly installed from stable CDs. PCMCIA version is 3.1.8 that
came
> with Potato.
>
> When I plug this in the following error appears on tty1: INIT: Id "S"
> respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes.
>
> The "S" entry in /etc/inittab reads: S:12345:respawn:/sbin/getty ttyS0
>
> The cardmodem seems to work at ttyS1, which is the first free port after
> the build in ttyS0. So what is this error about and how do I get rid of
it?
> Any help and hints appreciated.
>
> Hans
>
>
> The following is to get things of my chest, so you can skip it if you
like.
>
> I bought my notebook one year ago with cardmodem, ethernet card and later
> on scsi card. I installed slink, but because of a major relocation I
didn't
> use it much. After settling I put KDE on, but the modem wouldn't work:
pppd
> always died unexpectedly. I only found out that the network programs
> package from KDE messed something up after I installed Corel Linux on
> another machine and got the same problem. Mind you, I never used kppp,
just
> pppconfig.
>
> I ditched KDE, then the modem worked only very sloooowly (9600 kbps). I
> found a shop who loaned me a fresh modem card and things worked, so threw
> away the old card and put in the new. That was nine months after I bought
> the notebook and spending countless days and nights tweaking with config
> files, re-installing Linux and pcmcia support and mailing with countless
> people.
>
> Over the summer I didn't do anything, just running Windows, but now that
> Potato is out I thought I'd give it a try again. The error described above
> was the result. I tried the latest driver for the build in Lucent modem
> from the Linmodem.org page and it works, but then again, yesterday it
> didn't. Same with the cardmodem: then it works, then it don't. Why? I'm
> never sure why.
>
> In this year the ethernet card has worked like a charm, never giving me
any
> problems. I haven't used the scsi card much, only under Windows. It is
very
> frustrating that I don't feel I have a stable system; I would have
switched
> from Windows to Linux long ago if it wasn't for this modem thing that
keeps
> messing up. Part of the reason is that there is no good modem diagnostics
> tool, part that pon/poff doesn't give much support, part that the
cardmodem
> doesn't make noise, biggest part that the whole setup is so complex:
card -
> pcmcia - ttyS1 - ppp. I usually can find problems by tracing them back
from
> the end to beginning, like you do with electronics, but not so in this
> case. I'm not a computer geek, can't program, just a guy with some brains
> who is smart enough to solve problems by trial-n-error, elimination and
> studying from other people's experience. To me Linux is like a huge jigsaw
> puzzle and I like to do puzzles.
>
> Not to give a wrong impression: I blame everything on myself and I am not
> one would say "See, linux sucks." It's maybe that I do something wrong, or
> just don't get it in this case. Maybe someday I'll find the answer. In the
> meantime my two desktops have been happily running Potato and they will do
> so for a long time.
>
> Anyway, that is off my chest. Hope you didn't mind.
>
> Hans
>
>
>
> ---
>
> It's nice to be liked, but better by far to get paid -- Liz Phair
>
>
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