Fighting Kernel 2.6
By Adrian Sutton
I’ve been playing with Linux on my powerbook, mostly just for something to tinker with. Generally it runs pretty well, but I don’t have a lot of space on my internal drive and wanted to use my firewire hard drive for /usr. This is a major mission apparently. After many hours of compiling kernels with massive struggles in finding a set of options that will actually compile, I managed to build a 2.6 kernel. Sadly it freezes the machine during boot. It seems to not like running discover to automatically probe devices. I’ve removed discover and will be installing my modules by hand from now on – most things are compiled into the kernel anyway. So I’m finally up and running on 2.6. HFS plus support went AWOL so I’ve now applied those patches and am recompiling again – hopefully without drama this time. On the really cool side, the sleep light on my powerbook flashes when the hard drive is accessed.