utterly failing at upgrading a kernel

i had a great post started. except the success of what i was writing hinged on my ability to upgrade the linux kernel on my debian box. so i could get usb support. yeah, i know. your typical friday night.

i tried compiling the 2.6 kernel (a 20 minute endeavor on my little mini-itx baby)–several times. and each time booting with the new kernel i got the following error:

Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(3,1)

4 hours of that and i figured screw it.

so i tried to update to the latest kernel available (2.4) via debian’s dselect utility. well, that worked, the system booted, except without being able to talk to the internet–not so great for a webserver. being a little rusty on using ifconfig, i just wanted to get back to a working machine and be done with it.

so finally i got back to a 2.2 kernel with dselect. back to where i was when i started. the machine boots. and it can talk to the internet. what a waste.

4 Comments

tsk tsk, what have i told you about stable. :)

ha, but at least i’ve got a running machine with stable. what would you recommend if i wanted to get usb support? i was hoping i could just upgrade the kernel, but it looks like that might be getting things too out of sync with everything else.

do i need to make a wholesale move to unstable or testing?

stable is way too old for decent usb support. you probably need to dist-upgrade to testing at least. it looks like they have 2.4.something in testing so it should have usb support (including hotplug support). i think ‘apt-get dist-upgrade testing’ will do it.

of course, you could always switch to a distro that updates itself more than once every five years. i used to love debian, but seriously, the upgrade pace is insane. even slackware has more updates than debian stable.

running an apt-get dist-upgrade on unstable as we speak. we’ll see how that goes.

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