Re: Contents of /boot and /etc/yaboot.conf
"Chris" == Chris Doherty <c_doherty@hotpop.com> writes:
Chris> And /boot. Notice that there's no initrd.img symlink. I
Chris> thought there was earlier, but I was obviously mistaken.
The inintrd.img symlink is a convenience, and it is created by the
kernel install scripts when you first install an initrd kernel. What
is more important is the /boot/initrd.img-<kernel-version> file is
missing.
If you built your kernel with make-kpkg you need to provide the
--initrd switch to create an initrd kernel. If you do that then when
you install the kernel (with dpkg -i <kernel-pkg-name>.deb) it will
create the initrd image for you. Which part of this do you think
failed?
If you do not use the --initrd switch you don't get an initrd
kernel. You can safely take out the initrd line in yaboot.conf if this
is the case. I suspect this is what you have done. But it's not always
safe....
Is is usually *NOT* safe because you MUST make sure that you have
built every module that you need to mount the root file system into
that kernel so it can mount the root fs and find any other modules it
needs. If the root fs is ext3 it needs to be built in, not a module,
and so on! This can get tricky on modern h/w (like if you have a SCSI
or SATA drive etc), so you should use an initrd kernel. The best ones
are the Debian pre-packaged ones. Let Sven do the hard work for you ;-)
One more thing: if you managed to build linux-wlan-ng against the
Debian 2.6.8 sources then you should be able to use the linux-wlan-ng
modules package with the pre-built Debian kernel.
Oh, yes, since you really do seem to enjoy poking a system to death (I
mean that as a compliment) you might find these commands mildly
interesting
man mkinitrd
mount -t cramfs -o loop /path/to/initrd.img /mnt
(of course, your kernel needs to have the loop device built in, or
available as a module).
It scares me that I'm giving you all this advice. I've built kernels
twice this decade (last December to boot my spanking new G5 whose
970FX processors were unsupported by Debian the day I bought it, and
in early 2002 to boot an 8 year old "laptop" with a broken SCSI card).
Cheers!
Shyamal
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