The sound of frustration.. In trying to get my inbuilt SD card reader to work I had to upgrade from my trusty 2.6.19 kernel to a 2.6.20 kernel.
Now the 2.6.20 kernel has some pretty major sysfs changes that don't work well with an older HAL version (like anything older than 6 months). There is a compatibility option to enable n the kernel, but it's not *that* compatible.. Not wanting to really upgrade my Ubuntu 6.06 system to Feisty alpha, which is what would be required to make it all work, I embarked on a selective upgrade process. I didn't want to install all the -dev packages on my poor little laptop, so I installed another 6.06 in a QEMU virtual machine and did all the compiling there, just copying the finished .deb's to the host to selectively upgrade the required packages. I chose all the new packages from the Feisty tree so I'd at least be pretty up to date. In the end I had to upgrade udev, dbus, hal, gnome-power-manager & gnome-volume-manager. Along the way to keep the deps up I had to upgrade e2fstools, dpkg, dselect, debhelper, hwdb-common, hwdb-gnome, python2.4, python-central, python-dbus and install the new package gnome-mount. 3 days later and lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth, I now have an Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper system that functions perfectly with a 2.6.20 kernel with the compatibility options turned off. When I insert/remove media, it appears/disappears from the desktop. HAL no longer locks up at the first forced unmount, gnome-power-manager again detects me plugging/unplugging the AC and reports my battery state, and all is again well with the world.. And the best part is, I did not need to re-install the whole OS and re-do all the last 8 months customisation... <whew> Oh, and my SD reader now reads and writes cards without blowing up the kernel. Happy days! Needed to vent some frustration.. sorry about that.. Brad -- "Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." -- Douglas Adams
