oh yes. very screwed. i have absolutely gotta get help here!
the plethora:
1. i have
reisered my second hard drive using: reiserfsprogs-3.x.0k-pre8 set of tools. this went fine. did the reboot to let the kernel know partition changes took place.
i can mount the partition ok, but cannot umount it. i knew about this bug... so i decided to upgrade kernel to 2.4.6, becuz it is said to include all these bug patches plus be generally a leap over the prior 2.4 kernels...
2. meanwhile... before the kernel upgrade... i was having random system hangups... i have ximian gnome's red carpet mgr.... so I used it to remove some of my unused server software that i think was running in the background.
reason is... gkrellm notified me that sendmail had received an error mailing from anacron/crond about initialization probs with tripwire. i don't think i need tripwire (home system) and proceeded to eliminate samba and amanda and most of the individual server components that came with rh 7.1...
3. ok, this did not seem to cause any adverse effects that i could detect. everything still booted and all my user accts can be accessed.... then something went wrong:
4. i don't know how.. but gdm is gone! as in not anywhere! i think it may have been a package dependent on something i removed with red carpet... so it got removed, too. but red carpet is so blatantly against telling you what dependencies packages have, short of the 'necessary install', 'necessary removals' jive. it may have been mixed in with the other mess of files.
5. anyway, after i rebboted, i managed to ctrl-alt-backspace to the shell before xfree86 went into a loop of flashing my monitor for all eternity. there i managed to run xdm and get back to my root desktop... granted i'm stuck in gnome and can't get to root's kde desktop. i tried, but i can't get startkde to work either.. cannot start display ''... i have already edited inittab so that i go to runlevel 3 for a text login... and if i want xfree86 i just startx....
6. whew... at least i can still get into my machine
... ok, so i'm a dolt
, but have been pretty successful working around my probelms. .... back to reiserfs.. if i mount my reiser partition the umount will hang the computer both in the terminal window and on shutdown...
which makes me ctrl-alt-del my computer...
which makes me wait for a forced check on 'not cleanly unmounted' partitions on my drives...
which makes me mad
...
7. so i want to install the new
kernel. i read the text files that were in the kernel package and i am a little confused about this 'don't compile the Linux directory' stuff. when i gunzip the package in /usr/src it creates /usr/src/linux directory. should i copy the contents to another directory or rename the directory or what?
in my /usr/src directory i have these directories:
./linux
./linux-2.4.2
./linux-2.4.3
./redhat
./lilo-21.7.5 (this is the lilo version i will be referenceing later - it's supposed to read past the 1024 cylinder bios barrier... like grub does for me now!)
8. i have been using GRUB-0.5.96-i386-pc instead of lilo for my system... becuz of the 1024 cylinder jive. i was wanting to go ahead and give lilo a try, but am running into issues here as well: i was able to successfully compile lilo... but when i try to run /sbin/lilo i get the error that lilo does not exist.
this i find horribly funny considering the same terminal admits it is there with the dir command. so does gmc. the only idea i have on this is... is it a shell script? do i need to execute 'sh lilo' or something? or am i goofing up? the results were the same both from compiling by hand and using the QuickInst shell script....
9. ok, about the kernel. i need to install this to fix my reiserfs deal. so, given that redhat 7.1 included only the modules i needed for the kernel when i installed redhat , what special things do i turn on to get the following modules:
1810_audio, ac97_codec, soundcore, sr_mod, agpgart, parport_pc, lp, parport, autofs, 8139too, ipchains, ide-scsi, scsi-mod, ide-cd, cdrom, usb-uhci, and usbcore.
.......... and since i already have them i should be able to reuse them in the new kernel, instead of recompiling them, right? can i leave them alone or should i move them to keep 'em safe?
10. because i am having such a dread nightmare with where stuff is and why... not to mention battling red hat's scripts and relocations of stuff, i am building a linux-from-scratch system on the 2nd drive (why i wanted reiserfs and new kernel/lilo... i want it to be primo!
)
.. so out of all of these problems... i think the lilo/kernel/reiserfs parts are most important in getting going.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THANX FOR ANY HELP !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Rabid
'sometimes u just want to :smash: something... there, i feel better now!"