[gentoo-desktop] Re: Desktop problem with /dev/hda

[Duncan]

Lindsay Haisley posted on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 12:44:06 -0500 as excerpted:

> On Fri, 2010-09-10 at 07:02 +0000, Duncan wrote:
>> 2.6.32 is the current long-term-stable-support release.  If I were
>> running my kernels as long as you do, that's what I'd be upgrading to,
>> because it'll be supported (and get security and bug patch support in
>> further stable releases) for some time yet, not the 2.6.29 that's no
>> longer upstream supported.
>>
>> I'd STRONGLY suggest you do whatever research you might wish to, to
>> confirm what I just stated, and then then seriously consider 2.6.32.
>> Either that, or go back to 2.6.27, because altho its support is about
>> to end (again, unless someone else picks it up), it has been supported
>> as a long-term-stable for quite some time now and has a lot more of the
>> bugs worked out than 2.6.29 will ever get.
>
> Well you're right about that.  The current portage tree, in fact, has
> 2.6.34-r6 as the stable release.
>
> I run a couple of small businesses, one of which (my music biz) requires
> me to periodically do some traveling, so I'm away and pretty busy a lot.
> My pattern has been to get my various Gentoo and Ubuntu systems into a
> stable state and leave them, especially my desktop, since I'm often
> critically strapped for time, and tinkering with Linux gets pushed to a
> back burner.
>
> I'll probably get kernel 2.6.34, update udev, and give it another shot.

But note that 2.6.34 isn't a long-term-support kernel either, and will 
only have a relatively few updates (until shortly after 2.6.36 is 
released, and it's on rc3 or 4 already...).  Given how seldom you change 
kernels, I expect you really do want the latest long-term-support version, 
2.6.32.

...

While leaving updates that long isn't me, I understand how it can be for 
some users (and have put off updates myself recently, uncharacteristically 
for me for weeks at a time, for this very reason).  The point I was trying 
to get across is that if you are such a user (and really, regardless, 
whether you are or not), it's very critical that you read the news items 
if there are any before doing your updates (portage will tell you so if 
you do an ask or pretend; you can list and read them using eselect news 
<whatever>), and that you read and follow-thru on the ewarns, which 
portage by default displays again after the emerge is finished and which 
you can configure to be mailed to you or logged, etc, before you consider 
your upgrade done.  If you fail to do so, especially for boot-critical 
packages like udev, it's not a question of IF, but WHEN, such an update 
WILL break your system.  Unfortunately, you just found that out the hard 
way.

If you don't have time for reading those, you don't have time for the 
update, because you can't consider it done until you do, and follow thru, 
and failing to do so is risking spending a lot MORE time figuring out what 
broke and how to fix it, when things inevitably DO break, because the 
followups weren't done.  As I said, skipping the warnings, it's not a 
question of if, but when, and just how bad the breakage is going to be and 
how long it'll take to figure out and resolve the problem, so skipping 
them really is NOT a viable option.

I wish there were some way to really drum this into every Gentoo user's 
head when they started, so they never ended up having to learn it the hard 
way, as you did.  But as they say, if wishes were fishes...

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman