Friday, October 12, 2007

I was booting the wrong kernel from Slackware 12!

Yesterday, I was taring out what little hair I have on a failure of Slackware 12 to be able to mount CDs, even when I was root as I had been able to do days before. After finding out that support for filesystem types exists in the kernel and mount looks at /proc/filesystems or /etc/filesystems for the list of supported filesystem types, I realized that the kernal I was booting from didn't support the obvious choices. In fact, I couldn't even mount the Mandriva partition because it claims it didn't know its type. Next, this morning, I looked for information on what kernel I WAS booting from in the system messages and lo and behold I found that I was booting the wrong kernel. Not only was I not booting the correct Slackware kernel, but I was booting from the mandriva kernel. It is a tribute to Linux common design that I could get as far as I did with the wrong kernel and not destroy my system.

Problems with LILO

The reason I was loading the wrong kernel had to be due to the Master Boot Record I had created from lilo.conf from the Mandriva install as an effort to get that system back, which worked, and to boot Slackware. It had to be an error in lilo.conf that caused me to boot the wrong kernel. The solution became boot the full pathname of the kernel. Even though lilo seems to know which partition is root, it doesn't really know which kernel it boots from unless they are clearly different. Using the link /boot/vmlinuz confuses it, Maybe though the intermediate step I took of copying the slackware kernel to /boot on mandriva was the real fix, and I am still wrong about where it is really looking for a kernel. One way to find out is to rename the Slackware kernal copy and see if the error returns. If it doesn't change, then the MBR points to the right kernel on the right partition.

Setting up private website

I am running my websites through the loopback address on both Slackware and Mandriva. I was able to get slack working by uncommenting a line in the config. It hasn't been so obvious on Mandriva where it seems only the default document root is available. I think that both web servers are apache 2. On the Slackware side I was able to recreate the MAMP site I had built with the Mac but found out that Konqueror doesn't apply XSLT to XML the way firefox and most other browsers, maybe that's a configuration issue.

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A list of things to do:

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