hosers-talk: SuXE

["Jon Stewart" <stew1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

AFAIK, no one has been able to get Slash running on OS X (this seems to be 
the consensus on Slashcode, at least). My guess is that some of the CPAN 
modules Slash relies on can't cope with HFS+'s case insensitivity.

So, back to SuSE 7.1 PPC on my PowerTower.

Installation was more or less successful. I've got an old-world computer, 
with broken OF, so it first starts into MacOS 8.x and uses BootX to switch 
into linux. Using 2.2.18, everything boots up pretty well; I get some 
modprobe dependency errors, but they look harmless enough as they all seem 
to be symlinks relating to 2.4.2. Of course, kernel 2.4.2 just doesn't 
work on my machine.

KDE2 works fine; things seem to work.

After installation last night, I rebooted. Everything worked. During 
installation, I'd only specified that eth0 should be brought up on my 
D-Link 10/100 PCI card. SuSE's installer auto-detected it just fine; it's 
using the via-rhine driver. My onboard ethernet is 10baseT, and is 
auto-detected as Apple-MACE. 

So, on first boot, eth0 came up. I ssh'ed in from my ThinkPad. I logged in 
successfully. Great, I thought. I can go to bed and get Apache working 
tomorrow, and then go from there.

Since Erin's sister, Anah, is spending her spring break here, I was a good 
host and shut down the Tower of Power so she could get some sleep (had I 
known that our fine Mexican neighbors were going to serenade us with the 
Ruby-throated Mexican Tuba Bird at 5am, I would have left it on; hindsight 
is 20/20). This was a mistake.

Today, eth0 will not come up. 

I have used suse's yast&yast2 config tools to add eth1 for the onboard 
ethernet. /etc/modules.conf has:

alias eth0 via-rhine
alias eth1 mace

right at the top. Starting up yast shows that eth0 and eth1 are correctly 
configured and even active. When I exit and run rcnetwork restart, I get:

Shutting down network device eth1eth1: unknown interface: no such device
								failed
Shutting down network device eth0eth0: unknown interface: no such device
								failed

Looking in /proc/modules, I find nothing.

Looking in /var/log/messages, I find a few interesting things:

modprobe: modprobe: Can't open dependencies file 
/lib/modules/2.4.2/modules.dep (No such file or directory)

(there are a few of these errors)

and 

kernel: No module symbols loaded



Looking in /lib/modules, there's a 2.2.18 directory filled with 
subdirectories and module libraries. There's no 2.4.2 library.


Although a complete linux dummy, I am guessing that since I'm getting 
these modprobe errors and since /proc/modules is empty (I'm guessing it 
would list loaded modules), none of my modules are loading -- including my 
ethernet drivers -- because somewhere modprobe is being told to look in 
/lib/modules/2.4.2/, not /lib/modules/2.2.18.

I'm kind of amazed, though, that I can get a running system with no 
modules loaded. 

Rather than fix the root cause of this problem (that is, why modprobe 
thinks I'm running 2.4.2), I was thinking about creating a symlink:

/lib/modules/2.4.2 -> /lib/modules/2.2.18


Is this an incredibly stupid thing to do?

If so, do you have any advice as to how I can get my ethernet back up?



Jon
-- 
Jon Stewart
stew1@xxxxxxxxxxx

"and dropping a barbell, he points to the sky, saying 'the sun's not 
yellow, it's chicken.'"

			-- Bob Dylan