Configuration log for 2.4.20-pre3 (gubbio)
16 August 2002

Comments:

• This kernel booted fine but is known to have IDE problems
• It has been deleted from /boot and lilo.conf

Installation history

On 16 August 2002 I got the 2.4.19 kernel and the 2.4.20-pre3 patch by wget. I was sitting at my ancient but lovely laptop at home, putting things on gubbio. The download speed with wget was around 2MB/s -- I used to download things over a phoneline at 1MB an hour. I remember it took the whole night to get Netscape Communicator.

The -pre3 patch has a new CPiA driver that Alan Cox says has been running in -ac for a long time. There were also lots of other fixes, and no new features. No mention of IDE, so maybe this is safe.

I used make menuconfig, which worked great -- go to the very end to load the previous configuration (I got /boot/kernel-2.4.20-pre2.config). I added the CPiA driver and the special usb driver that goes with it, and then turned USB Mass Storage Support from module to yes, and then I added ISD-200 USB/ATA Bridge support for the Archos. I left the rest alone.

I do at some point need to start using modules again -- it'll make for a leaner kernel, and you can just use autoload. You just need to figure out how to turn off all the stuff that SuSE's configuration is calling up.

I then did make dep and was bothered by the slow connection trying to stream all the output, so when I had to rebuild (I'd forgotten the Archos), I did a make dep >& logfile & and it worked great. When it's done you get a [1]+ Done make dep 1>&logfile.

I then did make bzImage >& logfile & and it seems to be working great! Frees up the terminal, removes chance of a random disconnect disrupting the compile, and so on. Beautiful.

I checked the logfile and got a System is 1264 kB. I then copied

cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/kernel-2.4.20-pre3

and

cp System.map /boot/System.map-2.4.20-pre3

I then made and installed the modules, with make modules and make modules_install.

I believe this was the kernel that didn't boot, and I've deleted it -- Marcelo quickly released pre4, and then pre5. Still, people report having serious problems, and Alan Cox said the latest stable -ac patch was 2.4.19-ac4.

I'd like to use the new kernel's dv1394 driver and web cam driver, but these are details and I can't risk stability of the harddrives. I wrote to the linux kernel board on 1 September and sent the patch that's worked for me to Andre Henrick, the maintainer, as he appeared to have lost it and was keen to find a stable version. He and Alan should soon come up with a new stable set of drivers for the official 2.4.20. In the meantime, I decided to go with the latest stable kernel with the latest -ac patch, 2.4.19-ac4.