Hello
Film (<film@eleven.org>) wrote:
> Fix: I ran modconf and added (re-added) smbfs and (more importantly)
> my Realtek network adapter. This fixed the network problem.
>
> This leads me to believe you MUST run modconf after installing an
> initrc kernel image over the non-initrc bf2.4 or the 2.2.20. It's as
> if none of my original bf2.4 setup settings were mapped over to the
> new kernel.
>
> Obviously running modconf fixed some of my problems with the kernel
> upgrade. With that in mind, is there something else I need to run that
> is missing or are the modules the only thing that would change? Is
> there a way to force a menu-driven setup similar to the initial setup
> run from the CDs or does running modconf pretty much take care of
> anything that would have died?
The reason probably is that the installation kernels like bf24 have a
lot of drivers compiled into the kernel, while the normal 2.4.18
kernels have nearly everything compiled as modules (this is also the
reason why they use an initrd: without it you could not access the
hardware your root file system is on, as well as the root file system
itself).
> If re-running modconf is a required procedure following the upgrade to
> a initrc kernel, I wonder why a warning isn't posted at the same time
> as the "you need to add a initrc=initrc.img" warning during the
> initial setup.
>
> This still doesn't explain why my fstab file disappeared and why my
> video mode changed. This goes back to the 'do I need to re-run some
> sort of setup program?' question above. I'm guessing the new kernel
> doesn't know what kind of video card I have because it never went
> through some setup procedure. I wonder if fstab is created during
> setup as a result of some other procedure that needs to be run now
> that the new kernel is installed.
Maybe the old kernel was using the vesafb driver, which has to be
compiled into the kernel to work. It is not compiled into the 2.4.18-1
images, so maybe this is the reason the video mode changed. Maybe the
new kernel does not a framebuffer driver, so you could try to load one
and set some high-resolution mode. The vga16 driver should work on most
systems, but there are also other drivers for special cards, like the
rivafb driver for nvidia cards.
best regards
Andreas Janssen
--
Andreas Janssen <andreas.janssen@bigfoot.com>
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http://www.andreas-janssen.de/debian-tipps.html