Hi all

I have just completed a netinstall of Ubuntu 8.04 on my EFIKA. It started up ok once the installation had finished. I tried to mount my USB stick so I could copy the boot image in to /boot, but I got an error that the filesystem vfat was not known. I tried to 'modprobe vfat' but got an error about modules.dep not existing.

No major problem I thought, since I can copy files over the network. Wrong! No network interface was detected on the machine. I have followed this thread:

http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/vi ... php?t=1429

and made the changes to my interfaces file, but when I try to start networking I get the following error:

eth0: ERROR while getting interface flags: no such device

If I try to do 'ifconfig eth0' I get:

error fetching device information: device not found

Any advice on what I can do?

Can you give the output of "lsmod" and possibly "dmesg | grep 52xx"?

_________________
Matt Sealey

Ok, here we go.

dmesg output: lsmod output: I also get the following error on boot: uname -a does in fact report 2.6.24-19-powerpc, but this directory does not exist in /lib/modules. I tried creating a symlink with the foldername mentioned in the error pointing at a modules directory which does exist, but then I started getting errors of 'invalid module format'.

You probably have updated your kernel -or ubuntu did that for you. This message appears when you update your kernel -and the /lib/modules folder gets removed for a newer version and then you do a depmod -a.

You should reinstall the kernel package.

I didn't do it so it must have been done by Ubuntu. By the installer perhaps?
Could it explain the problems I'm having with networking and vfat support? I also notice that my USB CD-ROM doesn't work in Ubuntu...
Any suggestions how I can do that with no Internet access on this machine? I can boot an Ubuntu live CD on my Mac and have formatted a USB memory stick as ext3 so I can use to transfer files on to the EFIKA's Ubuntu installation (if that helps...)

It exactly explains them. Everything but the modules required to boot (disk, boot filesystem) are in /lib/modules/`uname -r`/ - including the network driver, usb modules and other filesystems.
How did you install Ubuntu?

The kernel package should be on whatever media you installed it with, and Ubuntu should be happy to use that as a repository to get it from.

You only need to reinstall it.

_________________
Matt Sealey

At least I know that if I solve one I solve the other ;-)
I booted efi804_netinstall from a USB memory stick and did the netinstall from there. Is there a better way?
Can I download the package manually, put it on a memory stick and install it from there? Or do I need to download an ISO of Ubuntu and use that? If the latter, I'm probably stuck since I've got no CD-ROM support!

I guess, you used an installer and boot kernel from genesi.hu. In this case the problem might be (99.9%), that the installer installed a newer version of the kernel, than was available at the time when I created these. Please check the Ubuntu threads, I documented a couple of times how to use mkvmlinuz to create a bootable kernel.

Personally I don't have Ubuntu any more on my systems (got a bit fed up by their slow response to bug reports). My last Ubuntu partition was over written just recently by AROS tests :-)

_________________
CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Yes, I used the ones from here:

http://www.genesi.hu/ubuntu/
Ahh, that makes sense.
Will do. Do I need anything beyond the base Xubuntu install to do that?

No, AFAIK, it is part of the base system. At least I don't recall that I ever had to install it separately.

_________________
CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Thanks, I will give it a try. I searched for all of your posts on mkvmlinuz in the Ubuntu forum and a bit confused. There are several posts with different parameters, and I'm not sure which I should use. Also, one mentioned applying patches to the kernel. Any chance of a hint as to which post I need to be looking at? ;-)

AFAIR, 8.04 already had all the necessary patches in, except sound. So there is no need to compile a new kernel, and sound can't be added, as there is no sound patch available for the kernel version used in 8.04

Here is a random sample: First of all, change to the /boot directory and list it. You will see similar names, but most likely not the same ones. The options are:

-o : output, this is how the resulting kernel image is called. Please don't overwrite an existing one, so you have a chance to back out :-)
-k : vmlinux file
-i : initrd file

The rest should stay the same.

_________________
CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Thank you Peter. I have just used the mkvmlinuz line you posted and it successfully created the file (I called it /boot/bootimage). I then booted the EFIKA with:

boot hd:0 boot/bootimage root=/dev/sda1

It booted successfully with no more errors about modules.dep. And I now have vfat support! Networking is still not working, but I might have borked the interface file when I was trying to get networking up before. I might try a reinstall and then go straight for mkvmlinuz and see if that works any better.

Thanks again!

Ahh, the NIC does work but I needed to do 'ifup eth0' in a terminal to make it work.