My computer has Woody installed and I update it every few weeks to the latest in unstable. Right now its mouse and networking are dead and I need help.
I had it set up and working great. The mouse worked, and the Internet worked. It booted to gdm and I had great fun in GNOME, surfing with Mozilla, etc. I started recompiling the kernel, and added in some stuff I wanted. That seemed to work great too. Then I did an "apt-get dist-upgrade" to get the latest stuff, and the mouse stopped working and the net stopped working. I didn't notice right away. It's a dual-boot system, so it gets rebooted frequently. The next time I booted back into Linux, mouse and net were dead. I had thought that I had killed them by choosing bad options in the kernel recompile, but I now suspect otherwise. I tried recompiling the kernel over and over, trying different options, and nothing helped. I removed the kernel and all modules, installed fresh from CD-ROM, and that didn't help either. I downloaded the unofficial Woody CD-ROM images and burned CDs. The images are timestamped 2000-02-18, i.e. they are the most recent available unofficial CD-ROMs. If the problem can be fixed by messing about with my packages, I have those to get packages from. Specifics on my system: The mouse is a Microsoft Intellimouse Optical USB. This computer also has a PS/2 mouse port but I am not using it right now. (I used to have a PS/2 mouse plugged into it, but I found that moving the PS/2 mouse would crash my Linux system, requiring a reboot. Ouch! So I unplugged it.) The computer is built on an Asus A7V motherboard, and the USB mouse is using the A7V USB. The A7V uses a Via chipset. Boot messages do show that the mouse is correctly detected. The mouse is plugged into a USB hub, and that is correctly detected too. The net card is a Linksys LNE100TX. Linksys has several cards with that name, and this is a fourth generation one. Under Linux it doesn't matter much--you use the tulip.o module for all LNE100TX cards, and a module built from a recent tulip.c will work with any LNE100TX card. Unfortunately, I do have to build my own tulip.o module because even the unofficial Woody CD image doesn't have a tulip.o module that works with a Linksys card. I use gpm. gpm is set to mirror the mouse info in raw format to gpmdata, and /dev/mouse is a symlink to gpmdata. X 4.0.2 looks at /dev/mouse. Right now, gpm does not start. If I execute the command "/etc/init.d/gpm start" I get no error message; it silently does not work. I tried making a copy of the gpm startup script and trying to track errors; gpm is returning a 0 status (no error) and gpm does not seem to make any error messages (I tried getting rid of the --quiet option, or is it --silent, on the startup). No error is indicated but "ps -e | fgrep gpm" reveals no gpm process running! With the net, if I run the route command, I see there are no routes anywhere. I tried typing the trivial route command from the man page: # route add -net 127.0.0.1 dev lo I get the error message "SIOCADDRT: Invalid argument". I don't think this is due to a problem with my net card, because the tulip.o module cannot cause a problem with the lo device! "ifdown lo" and "ifup lo" give the Invalid argument shown above, or else a bad file descriptor error. I tried "dpkg --purge --force-depends net-utils" followed by "apt-get install net-utils" but that did not help. I still cannot add any routes. Finally, a question about dmesg. My boot status messages scroll by at very high speed, so I figured I would use dmesg to review the boot messages. However, I have definitely seen error messages flash by that do not appear in the output of dmesg! For example, I know I saw the "SIOCADDRT" message flash by, but dmesg doesn't show it. I'm certain all the messages are in a log somewhere; how can I get them out into a text file? I can use the net when the computer is booted into Win98, so I can download something, then boot into Linux to use it. Also I have a CD of Progeny beta 3 and the unofficial Woody CDs to get packages. I tried very hard to solve the problems on my own, but I am stuck! -- Steve R. Hastings "Vita est" [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.blarg.net/~steveha
