Hi all
Has anyone here performed a successful 2.6 upgrade on a stock (well...
sorta stock anyway) Slackware 9 system? I am considering it, and am
curious of any pitfals or other issues I should know about before diving
into it. I know it's a test release, but I'm curious to see how well it
works on the system... other than the nvidia issue that I'm aware of.

Any input is appreciated. TIA

In article <pan.2003.07.22.00.40.49.871013@_NOSPAM_HERE_madpe nguin.org>,
Mad Penguin wrote:
> Has anyone here performed a successful 2.6 upgrade on a stock (well...
> sorta stock anyway) Slackware 9 system? I am considering it, and am

I'm about to. Well, I'll be upgrading the 9 to -current before I do the
kernel. Some non-Slackers on my LUG have been talking about it, but they
don't have much understanding so there's nothing worth repeating (except
perhaps to say that they're doing well with it.)
--
/dev/rob0 - preferred_email=i$((28*28+28))@softhome.net
or put "not-spam" or "/dev/rob0" in Subject header to reply

On Mon, 21 Jul 2003 17:40:50 -0700, Mad Penguin wrote:

> Hi all
> Has anyone here performed a successful 2.6 upgrade on a stock (well...
> sorta stock anyway) Slackware 9 system?

Yep, I did it over the weekend. It was relatively painless. A few hints:

The modutils package has been replaced for the 2.6 kernel. You'll need to
get and install the module-init-tools package from
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kerne...rusty/modules/. Be sure and
read the README so you configure it properly.

Once that's done, you can configure and build the kernel. Be careful, a
lot of options have changed and/or moved around -- I fell into the
apparently all too common trap of leaving out some console options, so I
was greeted with a blank screen the first time I booted into it.

As you know, you can't use the current nvidia driver, so you'll either need
to go back to the "nv" driver, or use the patch from
http://www.minion.de/nvidia.html to allow the nvidia closed-source driver
to work with 2.6.0-test1.

The patched driver doesn't perform particularly well, though it does
appear to be stable. 3D speed is about 2/3 what it was under 2.4, and 2D
speed is pretty sluggish. I imagine that this won't improve until nvidia
releases a proper 2.6 compatible version of their driver.

On the other hand, everything else about 2.6.0-test1 seems pretty stable
and performs really well for me so far.

Phil D.

On Mon, 21 Jul 2003 23:52:26 -0400, Phil DeBecker wrote:

> On the other hand, everything else about 2.6.0-test1 seems pretty stable
> and performs really well for me so far.
>
>

Oh, and here's an actually Slackware-specific tip: if you don't want to
disable your /etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug stuff, but are bothered by all of the
"FATAL: module XXX already in kernel" messages you get at boot time when
hotplug tries to load something that kmod has already loaded for you, add
these lines to the top of /etc/rc.d/rc.M:

# Quiet modprobe
MODPROBE_OPTIONS="--quiet $MODPROBE_OPTIONS"
export MODPROBE_OPTIONS

The correct solution would be to reconfigure hotplug to do the right
thing, but that would prevent it working with 2.4.x, and since I switch
back and forth I'd rather just not see all those messages when I boot.

Phil D.

On Mon, 21 Jul 2003 17:40:50 -0700
Mad Penguin <admin@_NOSPAM_HERE_madpenguin.org> wrote:

> Hi all
> Has anyone here performed a successful 2.6 upgrade on a stock (well...
> sorta stock anyway) Slackware 9 system? I am considering it, and am
> curious of any pitfals or other issues I should know about before
> diving into it. I know it's a test release, but I'm curious to see how
> well it works on the system... other than the nvidia issue that I'm
> aware of.
>
> Any input is appreciated. TIA

Besides dead drivers (sound, ethernet and mouse?!) all is good.


goodday
--
sodjiin

Uh?!? Cos'e' questo? Un messaggio di Mad Penguin? Vediamo:

> Hi all
> Has anyone here performed a successful 2.6 upgrade on a stock (well...
> sorta stock anyway) Slackware 9 system? I am considering it, and am
> curious of any pitfals or other issues I should know about before diving
> into it. I know it's a test release, but I'm curious to see how well it
> works on the system... other than the nvidia issue that I'm aware of.

I noticed some problems with xconfig, it seems the file .config isn't saved
correctly, so after leaving xconfig a lot of options i set weren't enabled.
So I got a blank screen. Someone else noticed something about?

ps = i apologize for my poor english, I hope you understand =)
--
Qualsiasi
"We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." Torvalds

Thanks to everyone for the input. I compiled the new kernel and had issues
(as mentioned by you guys) with modules. The ethernet card mod didn't
work. I had to recompile it twice for some strange reason. ??? Wonder if
that had anything to do with the config issue 'P' spoke of. In any case, I
got it running fine after the second compile. I didn't even bother with
the nvidia driver. This was on a test system so I can toy with it until
I blow it up :P

Desktop performance seems to be pretty good, though. I haven't played with
it too much yet, but I can tell you that Slackware on a stable 2.6 kernel
is going to be sweeeeeeeet!

Thanks again to everyone! Your input helped make my journey a little less
black.

Mad Penguin out >

On Mon, 21 Jul 2003 17:40:50 -0700, Mad Penguin wrote:

> Has anyone here performed a successful 2.6 upgrade on a stock (well...
> sorta stock anyway) Slackware 9 system? I am considering it, and am

I have a box at home I dual-boot between Slackware 9.0 and Windows XP. I
compiled a 2.6-test kernel about a week back and I'm not very happy with
it. So far I ahven't gotten framebuffer to work (but that's probably a
module or something I left out), and the mouse acts all funny. I've got a
Miscrosoft Optical mouse that uses the IMPS/2 driver in XFree86. This is
connected to a KVM switch and used between three different machines. Under
linux kernel 2.4.x I've not had any problems, but under the 2.6 kernel,
the wheel didn't work quite right with fluxbox. Anytime I'd move the wheel
over the desktop to switch virtual desktops, it would behave as a right
click, and there were some graphical problems with the windows that
opened.

I'm running this on an Athlon XP 1800 with a Radeon 9000 All-In-Wonder,
but don't have this problem under 2.4.x, so I doubt it's hardware related.
Note that I did compile it as a pre-emptive kernel, and I'm wondering if
this has something to do with my mouse problem.

On Wed, 23 Jul 2003 13:22:10 -0400, Alan Hicks wrote:

<SNIP>
>
> I'm running this on an Athlon XP 1800 with a Radeon 9000 All-In-Wonder,
> but don't have this problem under 2.4.x, so I doubt it's hardware related.
> Note that I did compile it as a pre-emptive kernel, and I'm wondering if
> this has something to do with my mouse problem.

We are running an Athlon 1600+ here with MSI Geforce4/128MB here. I
compiled preemptive as well, but the mouse seems to work OK so far.
Haven't tried it with Fluxbox yet though. I might have to take a look at
that as well.

I'm working on a small writeup on the 2.6 kernel in Slackware for
MadPenguin.org to give everyone a glimpse of the process and results so
they can get an idea of what it's like. So far, it's not been so bad. I
like the performance benefits and the bugs have been minimal. I still have
some playing to do though

On Tue, 22 Jul 2003 20:37:37 +0000, P wrote:

> Uh?!? Cos'e' questo? Un messaggio di Mad Penguin? Vediamo:
>
>> Hi all
>> Has anyone here performed a successful 2.6 upgrade on a stock (well...
>> sorta stock anyway) Slackware 9 system? I am considering it, and am
>> curious of any pitfals or other issues I should know about before diving
>> into it. I know it's a test release, but I'm curious to see how well it
>> works on the system... other than the nvidia issue that I'm aware of.
>
> I noticed some problems with xconfig, it seems the file .config isn't saved
> correctly, so after leaving xconfig a lot of options i set weren't enabled.
> So I got a blank screen. Someone else noticed something about?
>
> ps = i apologize for my poor english, I hope you understand =)

Scusa? Per cosa? non e niente, Io non scrive benne Italiano anche!

Ciao Fratello.