[Nottingham] Still no luck with 2.6-test5

[Philip Scott]

> Are you actually using test5-mm4?  It's got a bug if devfs is enabled,
> which stops root being mounted.
> http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=106423857728133&w=2

Nay, but never fear, I have got it working! After doing some prodding about in 
snapshots of the running 2.6 kernel from vmware (just after it hangs at boot 
time) I was fairly confident the kernel that I had compiled was not the one 
in memory. I did a make clean and then another make, and it was all spiffing 
and good. I am fairly sure that I had correctly built and installed the 
kernel on previous occassions, but I do remember the first time I built it 
missing out XFS support - when I changed the option in the config and 
rebuilt, somehow it still hadn't got built.

I suspect it may have something to do with my system clock, which can't count, 
and keeps on changing randomly - which has all sorts of wierd effects on make 
and Makefiles in general, however it was all hunky dory.

A few pitfalls:
~~~~~~~~
(Mainly for gentoo users)
I spent a good few hours trying to figure why xterm wouldn't work; the answer 
is that the /dev/pts filesystem is no longer automatically mounted as part of 
devfs. So unless you mount it manually, or add a line:

devpts			/dev/pts	devpts		defaults	0 0

Or similar to your /etc/fstab xterm, konqeror (Even trying to ssh in from a 
remote machine) will fail.

I spent many many hours trying to work out ALSA, which is amazingly powerful 
and also obsenely complex. I've got a reasonable grasp of it now, but my 
mixer window has well over a hundred sliders in it (For my Sound blaster 
live! emu10k1), some of which are for volumes, some for routing things around 
my soundcard, some for switching things on and off, and some just for making 
random buzzing noises. But all in all, a day well spent I reckon. I can't say 
it feels much different, but time will tell, i've not had chance to really 
push it :)

Oh, and quake3 doesn't seem to work, it just changes video mode and hangs, 
which is odd. Maybe it is just my dear computer being funny, I'll have to 
look into that more.

Happy hacking y'all!

Regards,
	Philip