Holy Kernel Bloat, Batman!

I'm trying to rebuild the Linux kernel and see if my laptop can handle 2.6.0. The number of questions asked during the configuration process was simply mind-boggling, and the number of applications I may or will have to rebuild afterwards is daunting-- Linux 2.6.0 stops using the OSS (Open Source Sound) system, which was always a little unreliable, in favor of ALSA (Alternative Linux Sound Architecture)-- Hey, if it's the default, can it still call itself "the alternative?" The source tree was nearly 70 megabytyes.

But I think I've got it set up now to build correctly. The only question then becomes, have I done it "right enough" to bring back the console on reboot? If I haven't, then I may be in real trouble-- there's no guarantee that the 2.6.0 module init functions work right with the 2.4.0 kernel. And what about suspend mode? Does that even work? PCMCIA? Eeek... I hope I haven't consigned myself to upgrade hell. Good thing I backed up the laptop last night.

A few depressing statistics:

• 78% of my readers use Windows.
• 6% use Mac.
• 5% use Linux.
• 11% wouldn't reveal their operating system.
• 162 readers use WebTV, 15 use OS/2, and 1 uses BeOS.

I downloaded and watched The Matrix Revolutions trailer. I'm ambivalent about it. We'll see.

Anyway, if you don't see anything more from me today, it's because I fried Lain trying to give her an upgrade. See you all later...

Dammit, Redhat, get it right!

Since you're seeing this, Linux 2.6.0 did not fry Lain's teeny little mind, although it did throw her for a bit of a loop. Everything that I bothered to experiment with worked. I hadn't quite gotten up to testing the sound, because more important to me was the Thinkpad features like hardware suspend. Unfortunately, that crashed the box. As bugs go, that's a biggie, so I reverted to 2.4.21 and everything's hunky-dory again.

I did track down one major nuisance of mine. The console has never come up in Dvorak mode, ever. It's always read "Loading Keymap: FAILED!" when I boot. This is no serious deal since X loads and its Dvorak handler works correctly. But I finally decided to figure out what was going on.

The program loadkeys tries very hard, based on the information you give it, to figure out what keyboard you're using. But RedHat, in a fit of... something... decided to put the dvorak, dvorak-L, and dvorak-R files in the keyboard tree. (The 'L' and the 'R' forms are optimized for users with only one hand.) The end result is that loadkeys couldn't figure out which one you wanted.

Solution: put the exact, fully qualified path, including '.map' and any compression suffix, into /etc/sysconfig/keyboard, and everything should work. In most redhat installs, that path is /lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/dvorak/dvorak.map.gz.