RLiegh's Journal: Finally got 2.6 to work

I am finally running Linux 2.6(.12). I may have been wrong about what the culprit was all along, too.

As I mentioned in this thread I am very disgruntled with Linux 2.6, and have been since I tried it in slackware (I want to say in slackware 9; but I'm not sure). I've tried it on three computers and finally I have it working on my new one.

The problem was twofold. One, Linux keeps choking on apic, so I had to add these two entries into the boot parameters:

noapic nolapi

The 'nolapic' is the signifigant one, I hadn't tried that previously. The following the boot parameters I'm using to get ubuntu 5.1 to boot:

noinotify noapic nolapic pci=noacpi noagp noagpgart

The other half of the problem surprised me, to be honest: it was hotplug. After I hammered out the above boot line I noticed that Linux mysteriously hung (with no errors) after loading hotplug. So I booted an old knoppix cd, mounted the linux install and made the /etc/init.d/hotplug* files non-executable.

I'd like to say it's worked like a charm, but this being Linux life is not so simple. Networking mysteriously failed to work, so I had to add a dhclient command to /etc/init.d/networking.

Also X failed to configure itself on my ubuntu install so after trying different things (including finding out that the x-window-system package is broken on ubuntu) I found a guide on ubuntuguide.org how to set up the NVidia graphics driver.

All of that and I'm still not done. Because of licensing issues (which, ironically, don't seem to bother other software distributions) Ubuntu doesn't ship support for playing mp3s, so I have to fuck around with reading preachy guides and trying to puzzle out where to grab codecs from. Bleah, BSD is, imho, far simply (pkg_add -v xmms beats reading guides and going on a mad scavenger hunt).

Been up since 4am I'm going to try to make sense of the guide and if the words dance too much I'll fuck with it later.

[Update 9/27/12:31mst]
I added ac_97=yes to the boot parameters (I suspect it's superfluous, though) and after fucking around with searching I -on a whim- did a 'MAKEDEV audio' in /dev and now I have sound.

Bleah bleah bleah.