The Site With the Lamp

May 10, 2004

Today for the first time I managed to get the 2.6.5 version of the linux kernel up and running with all the modules/devices working as expected.

I guess I have seen most of what can go wrong, starting from Warning: make dep is unnecessary now. (which was trivial) to the kernel incorrectly diagnosing my partitions as being corrupt. This probably happened because I have all kinds of partions on my system ranging from ext2 to reiserfs, i believed this may have been caused by an FS driver not being compiled in correctly. This turned out to be correct.

After all the steps this is what worked for me.

1. did a make mrproper on the source tree to clean up all the past mistakes and to start from scratch.
2. cleaned up the module-init-tools and reinstalled it.(setting the correct path with configure --prefix= is critiallly important and this is where i had gone wrong. I just used ./configure and this is not what I want (and probably not what you want either). ./configure --prefix=/ was the correct setting for me. After making these changes the annoying QM_MODULES error disappeared.
3. Then I did a make xconfig again but this time I was extra conservating when removing drivers, in fact I left most of it in tact and added a few for safe measure.
4. Even after all this I had trouble with a dialup modem, I had compiled the PPP module ok, so this wasn't the cause of the problem. In frustration I enabled everything under the Character Drivers -> Serial Drivers tree and my modem finally made that funny clattering noise.
   for good measure i didn't enable them as modules but hit 'y' which means they are part of the mean monolithic unit that's loaded at start up

That, ladies and gentlemen, is my story, I will be fine tuning things over the next few days by removing unwanted modules one at a time. If you are going down this road make sure that you never remove more than a module at each compilation, that's because if things go wrong you will then have to guess which module caused it.