How often to update?

[Duncan Gibson]

> I installed a basic Lunar in August/September and have spent the time
> since then in slowly expanding what's on there. As a Lunar newbie, it
> took me a long time to get a 2.6 kernel built and configured to support
> my wifi card, so I was a bit wary about running the upgrade in case I
> broke something.
> ...
> I should have stopped here and investigated, but it was midnight, and
> so I decided to bite the bullet, hoping that a complete 'lunar update'
> would get everything back on track again.
> ...
> Went in this morning to find that four modules had failed:
> 	ncurses, Python, oprofile and Python[yes, again!]
> Rebooted the machine out of curiosity. [Danger! Will Robinson]
> 
> Big mistake! It's lost my wifi settings somewhere, so no network!

Running 'dmesg' showed 'version errors' where the [existing] kernel
was expecting gcc-3.3.3 built modules but was barfing on the modules
that had been newly rebuilt with gcc-3.3.4. Rebuilt a new kernel from
scratch, but still no wifi. As Moe on #lunar pointed out, the madwifi
kernel module for my Atheros based wifi had been rebuilt during the
update, but for the [old] kernel, so I had to rebuild it again to work
with the newly built 2.6.14.1 kernel. A quick 'modprobe ath_pci' was
successful, and I was able to reboot with wifi. 

Then came the fun bit. I had wifi, but was unable to startxfce4 due to
a missing /dev/input/mouse0. After a lot of help and discussion from
Moe, Florin and Nestu on #lunar I was guided through the process of
downloading e2fsprogs(?) to update /etc/init.d/mount, removing devfs,
then running 'lin udev' before rebooting to get my mouse back. [*]

Sorted out the problems above. ncurses rebuilt without problem (as
predicted by Sofar) and Python rebuilt after I replaced a broken URL.
oprofile only works with 2.4 kernels, 'lvu eert' showed that nothing
else depended on it so I must have installed it on a whim. As I don't
remember, it can't have been important. So 'lrm oprofile' and it went.

The same 'version errors' had knocked out my soundcard, and Florin had
suggested to 'lrm alsa-driver' and configure the ALSA module in the
kernel instead, but muggins here forgot that I would need to load the
module into the kernel after reboot using 'modprobe snd_atiixp'. I had
assumed that the snd_atiixp entry in /etc/modules.conf was equivalent
to having the snd_atiixp line in /etc/modprobe.conf. Now I have sound!

So, a major update to my newbie's installation experience page:
http://wiki.lunar-linux.org/index.php/User_talk:Engelsman

Many thanks to Moe, Florin and Nestu on #lunar for all their help.

Cheers
Duncan [aka engelsman]

"The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything"