Craig's Linux Notes: Gentoo 2004.0 Upgrade (2.6 kernel)

Last modified: 01/01/2007

I upgraded to the 2.6 kernel to use a video capture card I purchased. I ran into a few problems during the upgrade, detailed here.

Contents

Which package?
Further preparation

LVM
Network
CD drives
X
devfs versus udev
Sound
Printer
Scanner
i2c & lm-sensors
svgalib
ati-drivers
xfree-drm
Coexistence with 2.4.x

Which package?

At the time of this writing, Gentoo packages the 2.6 kernel in the development-sources package. emerge it and then follow the Rebuilding kernel 2.6 instructions.

Further preparation

I failed to read all of the documentation and when I booted to 2.6 was unable to access any of my LVM partitions. I also made it so I couldn't access my partitions from 2.4, either. I eventually got myself out of this jam by getting a hold of a Gentoo 2004.0 Universal LiveCD. You would do well to get your hands on one of these before modifying your system further.

LVM

and for 2.6 kernels:

• Insure that Multiple Device Device Mapper is compiled as a module (dm-mod).
• Append the text dm-mod to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6
• For kernel 2.6.8.1, use the ata_piix module and autoload it, too.
  

Also see my LVM page.

Network

Doesn't work. Problem with PPPoE. "modprobe -v ppp" fails. "modprobe -v ppp_generic" reports that the modules is already in the kernel, despite that I configured it to be a module. The other ppp modules won't load. Solution: compile all the PPP modules into the kernel. Don't compile in PPPoE!

CD drives

Received a bunch of warnings on start-up. It was because I had a file in "/etc/modules.d" that contained 'options ide-cd ignore="hdc hdd"'. It was for SCSI emulation. I removed the file, re-ran modules-update, and my CD drives were accessible.

X-CD-Roast can see my drives as ATAPI only, but warns me to expect bad performance.

X

devfs versus udev

mknod /dev/ppp c 108 0

What else? My fax-modem broke. I needed to create this link:

ln -s /dev/ttyS4 /dev/modem

Maybe I could put a special rule in udev.rules for this, but it seems excessive. (To find the modem port, search /var/log/messages for ttySn.)

Also: access to IEEE-1394 devices broke because udev does not support them yet. Restore the devices with:

mkdir /dev/video1394
mknod -m 666 /dev/video1394/0 c 171 16
mknod -m 666 /dev/raw1394     c 171  0

The /dev/ieee1394 subdirectory has vanished, also, but I currently don't need it.

Sound

Printer

USB printer is missing. It does not appear with "lsusb".... turns out that the EHCI kernel module was blocking communication. Verified use of UHCI with "lspci -v" and checking the "prog-if" values. Once I removed this module from the build, I could see my printer on the USB.

udev has configured "/dev/lp0" for me. I added the following to "/etc/udev/udev.rules" to automatically create /dev/usb/lp0 and /dev/printers/0:

BUS="usb", KERNEL="lp[0-9]*", NAME="printers/%n", SYMLINK="usb/lp%n"

It was helpful to enable logging in "/etc/udev/udev.conf". Also helpful was the "ink" utility.

Now the printer works.

Just to check, cleaned out the kernel directory and rebuilt everything again with EHCI. And everything worked great. I suspect the initial malfunction was due to user error (using a 2.4 configuration file with 2.6).

Scanner

My scanner is recognized on the USB bus (shown with "lsusb"), but udev does not recognized it. This is because the "scanner" kernel module is not loaded. Because it is no longer part of the kernel. What now?

Step 1: "sane-find-scanner" locates the scanner:

found USB scanner (vendor=0x04b8 [EPSON], product=0x011e [EPSON Scanner]) at libusb:003:002

Step 2: "scanimage -L" fails. Solution: emerge latest sane-backends and compile with "usb" USE flag. emerge latest libusb to 0.1.8. Configure /etc/sane.d/epson.conf: the only non-comment line should be:

Now "scanimage -L" finds the scanner, but misclassifies it as an "Epson GT-8300". This is actually correct. According to the SANE Epson back-end maintainer's FAQ, this is an alternate model designation.

Step 3: Preview scanning with xsane fails. Xsane failed to actuate the scanner's head and displayed garbage. The problem was that sane was reading from the default scan source which is now a video capture card (tuned to The Static Channel). Solution: Add either "epson" or "epson:libusb" to the xsane command line.

Step 4: xsane only works for root. Gotta fix this. I need a hotplug script (not udev -- that's only when there is a kernel device driver module). The hotplug perms fix is detailed on Karl's SANE Epson Backend - libusb page. I edited /etc/hotplug/usb.usermap as described and added the epson_scanner script (the USB device is /proc/bus/usb/xxx/yyy).

i2c & lm-sensors

svgalib

ati-drivers

xfree-drm

Coexistence with 2.4.x

	Copyright © 2004 Craig Lawson
Index