Re: Kernel woes...!

[Paul <paul.corner-at-tesco.net>]

Hi Patrick

Comments mixed in below....

On Thursday 03 January 2002 7:48 pm, PKF wrote:

> Here's where I am.  After finally hunting down a replacement cdrom
> drive, I've finally got the BDI running on a 120 MHz/16Mb system.  I
> have found that the steppers run quite slowly, and the X interface is
> pretty clunky with the video hardware I have,

16Mb of RAM is pretty low. If you can increase this to 32Mb or even 48Mb, I 
think you'll find a vast improvement. 

>
> On the RH6.2 machine I'm currently running Linux kernel 2.2.12-20, which
> is not one of the versions that Ray's instructions mention.  Not too
> surprisingly, compiling RTL-2.2 anyway and trying to install it did not
> get me a working real-time kernel.

The kernel sources shipped with all the RedHat distros have extras patched 
in. Some of these result in the realtime patches failing and a broken kernel. 
Unless you want to get in to kernel hacking and applying the failed hunks by 
hand, the easiest choice is to use a virgin or prepatched kernel.
The kernel sources on the BDI disk are built from a virgin 2.2.18 source 
using the rtlinux-3.0 patch. If you wanted to compile your own, just install 
the kernel-headers, kernel-sources, and the rtlinux-source packages.
The 2.2.18 kernel will not require patching as this part has already been 
done !

> I know what you're thinking: the BDI was invented for you, ya
> bonehead!   That's great, and I'd install BDI on the faster machine in a
> second, except that I'd really like to keep using my ethernet card.  The
> BDI disk that I have contains a kernel that I don't think has any
> support for my card (not to mention my SCSI disk).

Which network card is this - If it has support in a 2.2.12 kernel, then it 
will work with later ones. The same goes for SCSI cards. Checking the kernel 
RPM, I see most of the SCSI drivers are pre-built. You could try using the 
kernel and rtlinux RPMs on your RH6.2 system.

> So the dilemma is:  do I flail away at compiling a kernel that will run
> on the faster computer, or do I give up and just go with the BDI minus
> the network?

If the RedHat 2.2.12-20 kernel is the only version that will support your 
network card, perhaps it is time to replace it - The RealTek cards are well 
supported, as are 3Com.

Regards, Paul.