Sarge->Etch upgrade on Ultra 10: 2.4->2.6 kernel issues etc
Hi all,
I have more-or-less successfully upgraded my Ultra 10 to etch, but there
were some oddities which might be of help to others.
I had been running a 2.4 kernel for sarge as I never got the 2.6.8 one
to work. For etch I knew I'd have to go to 2.6. I did the apt-get update
&& apt-get dist-upgrade routine, added the 2.6 kernel, and chose it on
re-boot.
The re-boot stuck at the point where it says "booting Linux... on the
white Sun Prom screen. At least it appeared to. After a while I found I
could ssh in from another machine, so it was booting, but neither the
boot messages nor X were appearing on my screen.
I eventually discovered that the problem was that my U10 has two
graphics cards: the Sun Creator3D one and an ATI one which is part of
the main board. The 2.4 kernel picked the Creator3D one for its boot
messages, the 2.6 kernel picked the ATI one. You can prevent this by
using the kernel bootprompt option video=atyfb:off To make this the
default, add the line
append = "video=atyfb:off"
to the relevant section of /etc/silo.conf
Having got my boot prompt to appear, (X failed to start) I found that
the keyboard produced gibberish. This was a better-documented issue: I did
dpkg-reconfigure console-data
and chose pc/querty/british from the full list.
Hurrah. Now I could log in at the console to fix X. I added
Load "cfb"
Load "cfb32"
to the Module section,
changed a couple of keyboard options to read
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
and in the mouse section:
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
The actual keyboard and mouse are still Sun ones, of course, but are
handled differently under xorg/2.6.x.
It's back to being a usable machine now. Time to see if sound and 3D
acceleration can be made to work ...
Hugh
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