Woody mouse and net are dead
My computer has Woody installed and I update it every few weeks to the
latest in unstable. Right now its mouse and networking are dead and I
need help.
I had it set up and working great. The mouse worked, and the Internet
worked. It booted to gdm and I had great fun in GNOME, surfing with
Mozilla, etc. I started recompiling the kernel, and added in some stuff
I wanted. That seemed to work great too.
Then I did an "apt-get dist-upgrade" to get the latest stuff, and the
mouse stopped working and the net stopped working.
I didn't notice right away. It's a dual-boot system, so it gets
rebooted frequently. The next time I booted back into Linux, mouse and
net were dead.
I had thought that I had killed them by choosing bad options in the
kernel recompile, but I now suspect otherwise. I tried recompiling the
kernel over and over, trying different options, and nothing helped. I
removed the kernel and all modules, installed fresh from CD-ROM, and
that didn't help either.
I downloaded the unofficial Woody CD-ROM images and burned CDs. The
images are timestamped 2000-02-18, i.e. they are the most recent
available unofficial CD-ROMs. If the problem can be fixed by messing
about with my packages, I have those to get packages from.
Specifics on my system:
The mouse is a Microsoft Intellimouse Optical USB. This computer also
has a PS/2 mouse port but I am not using it right now. (I used to have
a PS/2 mouse plugged into it, but I found that moving the PS/2 mouse
would crash my Linux system, requiring a reboot. Ouch! So I unplugged
it.)
The computer is built on an Asus A7V motherboard, and the USB mouse is
using the A7V USB. The A7V uses a Via chipset. Boot messages do show
that the mouse is correctly detected. The mouse is plugged into a USB
hub, and that is correctly detected too.
The net card is a Linksys LNE100TX. Linksys has several cards with that
name, and this is a fourth generation one. Under Linux it doesn't
matter much--you use the tulip.o module for all LNE100TX cards, and a
module built from a recent tulip.c will work with any LNE100TX card.
Unfortunately, I do have to build my own tulip.o module because even the
unofficial Woody CD image doesn't have a tulip.o module that works with
a Linksys card.
I use gpm. gpm is set to mirror the mouse info in raw format to
gpmdata, and /dev/mouse is a symlink to gpmdata. X 4.0.2 looks at
/dev/mouse.
Right now, gpm does not start. If I execute the command
"/etc/init.d/gpm start" I get no error message; it silently does not
work. I tried making a copy of the gpm startup script and trying to
track errors; gpm is returning a 0 status (no error) and gpm does not
seem to make any error messages (I tried getting rid of the --quiet
option, or is it --silent, on the startup). No error is indicated but
"ps -e | fgrep gpm" reveals no gpm process running!
With the net, if I run the route command, I see there are no routes
anywhere. I tried typing the trivial route command from the man page:
# route add -net 127.0.0.1 dev lo
I get the error message "SIOCADDRT: Invalid argument". I don't think
this is due to a problem with my net card, because the tulip.o module
cannot cause a problem with the lo device! "ifdown lo" and "ifup lo"
give the Invalid argument shown above, or else a bad file descriptor
error. I tried "dpkg --purge --force-depends net-utils" followed by
"apt-get install net-utils" but that did not help. I still cannot add
any routes.
Finally, a question about dmesg. My boot status messages scroll by at
very high speed, so I figured I would use dmesg to review the boot
messages. However, I have definitely seen error messages flash by that
do not appear in the output of dmesg! For example, I know I saw the
"SIOCADDRT" message flash by, but dmesg doesn't show it. I'm certain
all the messages are in a log somewhere; how can I get them out into a
text file?
I can use the net when the computer is booted into Win98, so I can
download something, then boot into Linux to use it. Also I have a CD of
Progeny beta 3 and the unofficial Woody CDs to get packages.
I tried very hard to solve the problems on my own, but I am stuck!
--
Steve R. Hastings "Vita est"
steve@hastings.org http://www.blarg.net/~steveha
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