On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 11:36:48AM +0100, Brett Parker wrote:
On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 11:19:27AM +0100, cl@isbd.net wrote:
On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 09:57:53AM +0100, Brett Parker wrote:
I'm fairly sure that 2.6.18 has been released, Noodles probably knows better than I... *looks at kernel.org* - yup, it's been released, 2006-09-20 was the release date :)
Yes, I know that, but there's no distribution with the released version of the 2.6.18 kernel in it yet - at least not a 'major' distribution. I need to get something up and running in order to enable me to build a released 2.6.18 kernel.
Debian Unstable has it... That's a rather major distribution... OK - so it's not a released distribution... ;) I believe that Ubuntu Egdy ships at the end of the month with the 2.6.18 kernel too...
Yes, OK, Ubuntu Edgy is one of my two 'front runners' at the moment. I want a distribution that's officially supported by Vmware. The Ubuntu Edgy beta does pretty well at installing itself actually as they have already put the JMicron PATA patch into it and thus it can see my CD drive which is more than any other distribution I've tried so far.
The advantage of Suse is that it's rather easier to customise the way I want it (or so it seems so far), I can get to run an FVWM2 based desktop with very little effort.
I could also, of course, go for Slackware 11 which would make it very easy to transport all my customisations across from my old Slackware 10.x system. Slackware 11 comes with 2.6.18 as an optional kernel. It's just a bit messier to install Vmware, that's all.
While I've been waffling away here the system *has* rebooted successfully and now I can make TCP connections to the outside world!
:-) Thanks very much indeed.
Not a problem, as I said, was bitten by this on someones gentoo system a while ago, and on a couple of our servers a while after that... so it came to mind :)
It's one of those things which is trivial to fix but *very* difficult to diagnose. It did point pretty conclusively at the router when I found I could ssh from the new Linux box to the old one on the same subnet.
This whole process has been quite an education in (not?) buying bleeding edge hardware. It's something I have always avoided in the past, mostly on the basis that "just a little behind bleeding edge" is usually better value for money.
However this time everything and everyone said that the Intel Core 2 Duo processor was the one to go for as it's a significant jump ahead of the best AMD 64x2 processors at the moment. The price differential wasn't that significant compared with the AMD processors so I went for it.
I don't regret the decision really, I have an existing system (well, two systems) that continues to work OK so I can wast time on the new system without any real pressure to get it working quickly. The initial problem that pushed me to a new system (my win2k desktop was failing to boot more and more frequently) turned out to be a flakey power supply and replacing that has made it 100% reliable again.
I have (hopefully) a workaround for the JMicron IDE problem on the way, I've ordered a SATA CD/DVD drive. I should then be able to install a stable version of either SuSe or Ubuntu without hassle.
I have already worked around the Realtek 8168 NIC problem by putting a cheap NIC in one of the PCI slots.