Re: [Hampshire] Kernel compilation woes

On 16 February 2010 22:31, Charlie de Courcy <Charles.De-Courcy@???> wrote:
> I'm going round in circles and banging my head against a brick wall so
> it's time to call in the experts :)
>
> To set the scene I'm running Fedora 12 with 2.6.31.5-127
>
> I've bought a shiny new samsung laptop. Problem is that it appears the
> hardware is *too* new. Everything seems to be up and running apart from
> the onboard NIC (Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Device 4318), and
> wireless card (Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device 8192).
> I'm just focussing on the ethernet at the moment, the wireless I'll dig
> into when I can actually get some packets flowing.
> The device is supported under kernel 2.6.32.8, so I'm trying to get this
> onto the networkless laptop.
>
> I've downloaded the source from kernel.org on my other laptop, run 'make
> menuconfig' and set what I believe to be the right (and safe) options.
> Then 'make bzImage', 'make modules' and 'make rpm'. This all ran without
> failure and I moved my fresh rpm over to the new laptop.
>
> I ran 'rpm -ivh kernel.blah' and it installed seemingly successfully.
> 'mkinitrd /boot/initrd-.blah blah' to create the ramdisk image.
> I was however expecting the rpm install to update my menu.lst but it
> didn't. I believe I've put everything in the right places, using the
> default entry as a basis:
>
> title Fedora (2.6.31.5-127.fc12.i686)
>     root (hd0,4)
>     kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.i686 ro
> root=/dev/mapper/luks-2ddd7768-d55b-4b7c-857d-d346505c3bed noiswmd
> LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=uk
> rhgb quiet
>     initrd /initramfs-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.i686.img
> title Fedora (2.6.32.8.fc12.i686)
>     root (hd0,4)
>     kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.32.8 ro
> root=/dev/mapper/luks-2ddd7768-d55b-4b7c-857d-d346505c3bed noiswmd
> LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=uk
> rhgb quiet
>     initrd /initrd-2.6.32.8.img
>
> However it doesn't work... after going through the password prompt for
> LVM decrypt I'm just left with a flashing cursor. Output of
> /var/log/messages points towards massive X display failures: "GDM
> Display lasted 0.080075 seconds". Xorg.log says that screens are found
> but none have a usable configuration.
>
> What am I missing..? Could anyone assist please or point me towards a
> better way of doing things or how I can troubleshoot further? At this
> point in time everything has to be transferable via usb key...
>

Even if the X display does not work, you should be able to log in to a
text terminal.
Press CTRL-ALT-F1 and you should get a login screen.
You can then login and see if you have eth0 or eth1 using the ifconfig command.
If you do, run "dhclient3 eth0" to get an IP address, and then you
can do an upgrade over the network etc.