[ltp] Experience from updating RH 6.2 to RH 7.0 on TP 770X

[Friedemann Baitinger]

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I had some time to kill during this week so I thought it would make
sense to upgrade my TP 770X to RedHat 7.0. First of all, I did _not_ try
the regular RedHat 'update' process since I know from doing so on
another machine that it doesn't yield the desired results. Instead, I
copied the whole disk over the network to a disk in one of my servers.

After having done that I did a complete new install of RedHat 7.0. In
general, installation went smooth as expected. Machine boots from the
CD, graphics chip is detected correctly, even sound chip is detected....

After rebooting and starting the X-server I was deeply disappointed
because graphics performance really sucked. This became especially
evident when I tried to move the netscape window. It didn't take long
till I found out, that option 'accel' was not set. Unfortunately I
wasn't able to get acceleration setup with this X-server (XF86_SVGA) at
all. With accel set, X came up but some spots in the panel area remained
black and moving an xterm window over the desktop also left garbage on
the screen. I finally decided to take a binary copy of the XF86_SVGA
from my old RedHat 6.2 and that now works with accel just like it 
did before.

I have never managed so far to figure out, whether I am now running
XFree86 4.0.1 or still 3.3.6. Some servers are explicitly versioned with
4.0.1 others are not. I read in the German c't' magazine that although
RedHat 7.0 installs XFree86 4.0.1 it still doesn't automatically
configure the system to consistently using it. (Anybody more details on
what to do here?)

Anyway, I am quite happy with the performance of my old xserver binary
so there is no need to rush things here.

Another hurdle is the fact that a standard linux kernel cannot be
compiled error free with the newly installed RedHat 7.0. Some research
in the filesystem and in the 'net' using 'google' indicated that there
is a /usr/bin/kgcc for that purpose and I had to swap the /usr/bin/cc
symlink to /usr/bin/kgcc (from /usr/bin/gcc) in order to build my own
kernel. Basically I left it that way because I thought a compiler that's
good enough to compile the Linux kernel should also be good enough to
compile the few applications which I usually need to compile.

Sound was the next step. Obviously it did not work out of the box so I
downloaded the latest alsa drivers (0.5d) and built and configured the
stuff on my own as always. Using my old settings from /etc/asound.conf
and /etc/modules.conf brought the sound back up in no time.

After all, I think it was worthwhile to upgrade. At least I now have a
reasonably consistent system and got rid of the garbage that piled up
over time. However, it is worthwhile to note that the whole process took
me about 20h (!) although I can safely state that I consider myself very
experienced with this kind of work as I have done it many times on
various types of machines and various distributions (SuSE, RedHat).

Here is a short summary what I had to manually adapt:

  - X server (as described above)
  - alsa sound (also described above)
  - manually configure, build and install socks (doesn't seem to be on
    the RH CDs)
  - rebuild openssh to socksify it
  - installed newer versions of SDL and smpeg in oder to get the
    smpeg-xmms going with xmms-1.2.3
  - installed and configured latest version of VMware-2.0.3
  - various kernel reconfifs/builds to get an optimized kernel


Remaining todo is to get the TokenRing setup up correctly. As some of
you may remember I had severe problems with any kernel > 2.2.14 with
Token Ring and VMware doing host-only networking. I hope, although it is
very unlikely, that this problem may have automagially disappeared.
  

- -- 
Friedemann Baitinger      fb@baiti.net       http://baiti.net/fb/
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