Very Computer

This week I took the time to upgrade from RedHat 4.0 (kernel 2.0.18) to
RedHat 4.1 (kernel 2.0.27).  For what it's worth, I encountered two new
issues:

1) I have a CL5422 video chip set on a Boca II SVGA card.  Although this
card ran fine under 4.0, X failed to start after the upgrade to 4.1.  After
an hour or so of trying all kinds of video chip/monitor combinations using
Xconfigurator, I noticed a cryptic message among the error messages being
spewed to the screen when X failed.  The message went something like this:
"Clock speeds are irrelevent with CL5422 chip set."  

During the Xconfigurator process, I had not specified any clock speed
information.  But I looked at the /etc/XF86Config file and there was a line
within the file defining the various clock speeds.  I checked the old file
from version 4.0 and the clock speed line was also in that file.  (Remember,
the video card worked fine under 4.0).  I commented out the line in the file
and X started fine from then on.

2) RedHat 4.1 failed to find my NE2000 clone ethernet card.  (This too was
not a problem under 4.0).  After reconfiguring the 2.0.27 kernel several
times to insure support of the card and ethernet, I finally compared the two
driver files from 4.0 to 4.1.  The driver file is ne.c and the 4.0 driver is
much more robust in checking for the existance of the card and various
clones.  The 4.1 ne.c driver file is much less tolerant of irq and base
address locations.  

To fix this problem, I had to add boot parameters ether=10,0x6000 to inform
the OS were to detect the card.  

All this may seem trivial, but in both cases the software for the particular
hardware cards has been downgraded instead of upgraded as you would expect
in a later release.  What should have been a less then an hour upgrade
actually caused about 4 hours of troubleshooting due to lack of attention to
detail by the people who put together the distribution.  How are we ever
going to compete with Microsoft if we downgrade our upgrades?

Comments welcome.

Quote:>2) RedHat 4.1 failed to find my NE2000 clone ethernet card.  (This too was
>not a problem under 4.0).  After reconfiguring the 2.0.27 kernel several
>All this may seem trivial, but in both cases the software for the particular
>hardware cards has been downgraded instead of upgraded as you would expect
>in a later release.  What should have been a less then an hour upgrade
>actually caused about 4 hours of troubleshooting due to lack of attention to
>detail by the people who put together the distribution.  How are we ever
>going to compete with Microsoft if we downgrade our upgrades?
>Comments welcome.

At this point that cute little menu system was rather infuriating.
I ended up copying the rpms and the base directory contents to a
hard drive partition and selected hard drive upgrade. That seemed
to work, but I later found out that some of the packages had not
been upgraded and the system became quite unstable. I've since reinstalled
RedHat 3.0.3, which has no problem seeing the drive.

 Another point is that the procedure RedHat describes for recompiling
the kernel in their manual doesn't work, at least on the systems I've
tried it on, bombing with some error message. The old
make zImage ; make modules ; make modules_install
deal works, but one has to manually move the compressed boot image
to /boot/whatever.

 On the plus side, installation was smooth on the other two systems,
2/3 isn't bad. :-)
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Quote:> All this may seem trivial, but in both cases the software for the particular
> hardware cards has been downgraded instead of upgraded as you would expect
> in a later release.  What should have been a less then an hour upgrade
> actually caused about 4 hours of troubleshooting due to lack of attention to
> detail by the people who put together the distribution.  How are we ever
> going to compete with Microsoft if we downgrade our upgrades?

> Comments welcome.

Another problem I found was that if you have metro-X installed on your
system and you uninstall using RPM (because you want to use XF86
instead), the keyboard map table gets deleted and many of the keys stops
working under X.

Another problem I found (may have been there in 4.0 also) that glint
(gui interface to RPM) does not display any error messages when the
installation of a package fails because of dependencies.

These are minor problems and would be nice to have them fixed. And I
agree with you that Redhat needs to pay attention to some of these
upgrade issues that come up. It is alright for a system at home but if
you use it in an office with a number of computers, to repeat the
post-upgrade tweaks on all the systems becomes a pain. Of course, it
does not mean Microsoft upgrades are painless.

--
/***************************************************************************
Amit Chatterjee

All opinions are mine, not NORTEL's.
****************************************************************************/

Quote:> Another point is that the procedure RedHat describes for recompiling
>the kernel in their manual doesn't work, at least on the systems I've
>tried it on, bombing with some error message. The old
>make zImage ; make modules ; make modules_install
>deal works, but one has to manually move the compressed boot image
>to /boot/whatever.

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