Economy Size Geek

Ok I have mostly finished the upgrade process. I tried to upgrade three computers to Feisty - my workstation, my laptop, and my home file server.

File Server

I didn’t get very far with the file server. I have a boot partition of 30MB on it (That is only RAID1 since Linux won’t boot off of software RAID5). Right now 17MB is taken up with the current kernel (Who knew they had gotten so big). The installer needs 30MB of free space on boot to even start the install. I guess I’m going to leave that box alone until I revamp the arrays - annoying…

Laptop

I would say that my experience on the laptop was the best so far. I copied over all the packages downloaded to my workstation so that sped up the install process nicely. I didn’t have to many conflicts that needed to be sorted out. It pretty much just worked. The only thing that didn’t was for some reason the Compviz stuff isn’t installed so I don’t get any desktop effects. I really wanted the cube desktop thing - going to have to dig into that.

Workstation

It proved to be an overall nightmare. It wouldn’t boot off of the generic kernel - it could only use the 386 kernel. The bummer is that the 386 kernel doesn’t support dual core/SMP. So I resorted to something I haven’t had to do forever - I compiled my own kernel. I found this article which made it pretty easy to recompile and install everything. The hard part was waiting for the kernel to build. I had to do it twice because I accidentally copied over the SMP settings on the first build. My custom kernel isn’t handling my RAM properly (I’m about a GB short).

So the custom kernel combined with the custom NVidia driver meant it took me a long long long time to get the machine up and mostly running. I’m going to assume this will get better as my hardware gets a little more behind the curve. (Compviz doesn’t work on my machine - so no new hotness here either).

Update: Ok now I know why I hate compiling my own kernel. Turns out I no longer have VMWare. I’m having a hard time getting it to compile…GRRR