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Post by nuihc88 on Aug 22, 2021 3:32:15 GMT
I have been busy with a ridiculous amount of stuff lately so haven't had the time to have a second look at it yet. Could very well be that my main problem the first time around was that i dove too deep into the kernel stuff and tried too many things without taking my time to get the basics down first. There's a good chance things will just work out of the box once i have the basics down. Last time i was also unable to find any up-to-date documentation. (kernel compilation instructions i used as my main reference were written for 2.6.* if i remember correctly...)
Few weeks ago i was just about to give up on my 1005HA-H (32bit) and swapped it's motherboard with my second-hand 1005P (64bit) to have another go with Bodhi (64bit) and prepare for another look at the kernel stuff, but decided to try Escuelas Linux instead and then got distracted when i found out about a custom ROM for my Android-tablet and started rooting and messing with it's Kernel's ramdisk...
I'll try to have another look within a week or two and then share my notes on the steps i took...
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Post by ylee on Aug 22, 2021 13:59:20 GMT
I installed BL6 (64 bit) on what I call my 'spare Laptop' and set up a 32bit Debian Bullseye chroot on it to experiment with compiling and or packaging kernels. I found the Debian Linux Kernel Handbook which is available online or as a deb file. We will see how that goes... Meanwhile I suspect issues with old hardware, modern kernels and drivers are not just related to the kernel code but also related to other things like Xorg. Consider the nvidia-legacy-304xx driver. Look at the Debian Bug report: nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-304xx: does not support Xorg Xserver 1.20. From nvidia: The Linux 304.* legacy driver series is the last to support the NV4x and G7x GPUs and motherboard chipsets based on them. Support for X.Org xserver version 1.19 was added to the 304.* legacy driver series with version 304.134, and support for Linux kernels up to Linux 4.13 was added with version 304.137. No further releases from the 304.* series are planned.Notice this driver needs an even older kernel than 4.19  Without downgrading packages, any computer with a Nvidia graphics card, whether 64 bit (or 32 bit?), is faced with either sticking with the open-source Nouveau driver for NVIDIA graphics cards or running with kernel option nomodeset. Have no idea on how well Nouveau supports these cards or what would be needed to make it work correctly and nomodeset is not ideal leaving you with a low screen resolution. Downgrading packages to support this 304 nvidia driver leads to a bit of a mess. So the question becomes how many other drivers for old hardware are going to have related issues. Astroboy (Escuelas Linux) installs on ALOT of old machines and some of them seem to need an even older kernel: the deb files of an even older kernel to make available for install, the 3.16 one, for a few rare computers in which the 4.9 kernel was not suitable.Maybe I could have managed to get the 4.9 kernel working on those machines and maybe not. I don't know any further details than the above statement from a FB discussion we had about kernels and 32 bit support. At some point clearly we have to say our distro does not support installation on a machine that old (286 anyone?). With the kernel changing, Xorg changing, companies discontinuing support of old closed source drivers, software requiring features whether CPU, kernel or otherwise that may prove problematic on older machines and so on, our job becomes more difficult and we have to consider "moving that line up" and discontinuing support of machines that maybe older Bodhi versions supported. Plus you have to consider I do not have a room full of old as the hills machines to test things on anyway (nor do I want 50+ old 32bit machines sitting around my house). |
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Post by oblio on Aug 22, 2021 14:49:14 GMT
It seems like a formidable task to say the least and ylee painted a vivid picture of the struggles that would be encountered. Sometimes just getting old equipment to run and get on the internet is a feat in itself; I've been lucky in my reincarnation attempts so far. |
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enigma9o7
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Post by enigma9o7 on Aug 22, 2021 14:55:29 GMT
I had fun with nvidia-304 myself, but nothing to do with 32-bit or BL6; my issues go back to BL5  That's the gpu on my athlon 64, and fyi the last ubuntu to offer it was 16.04; it wasn't in bionic. There was a way to apply a patch and make it work in bionic and I did that, but it caused glitchy graphics problems, so I ended up just using noveau. [ www.linuxquestions.org/questions/bodhi-92/graphics-problems-nvidia-6100-a-4175634086/#post5880074 ]. However nvidia-304 did work on bodhi 4.5 tho which is where I very first started. Earlier in this thread I mentioned nvidia-340 was not supported in linux newer than 5.4 as a concern; that has apparently been patched and no longer a concern, at least for ubuntu. I have two 64-bit machines that use that driver so that makes me happy, one being my primary laptop. However, it doesn't seem to be in bullseye repository...
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Post by oblio on Aug 22, 2021 17:04:38 GMT
That's a handy output - I haven't come across that report site before; I'll have to check it out with my systems.
Interesting your HDD is throwing SMART errors...generally not a great thing. |
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enigma9o7
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Post by enigma9o7 on Aug 23, 2021 15:54:52 GMT
Interesting your HDD is throwing SMART errors...generally not a great thing.
I noticed that too. As I'm actually only using the drive listed the line above, a SATA 128GB SSD (that I bought new for $20). The 40GB IDE drive doesn't actually matter, although it does still have bodhi legacy 5.1 and windows xp on it, if it were to fail it is no great loss. I was completely unaware of the errors tho until I ran that tool that created all those reports, but based on brief glance at the error report it seems unimportant, but I dunno.
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Post by oblio on Aug 23, 2021 16:39:33 GMT
@enigma907 SMART errors should show up from your BIOS at POST, pending that setting being turned on in BIOS. I suspected it was an older/test drive, backed up as good Linux users do, etc., but thought it was worth a mention. Regardless, it is a cool graphical breakdown of system stats.
Thanks again for sharing!
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Post by ylee on Aug 23, 2021 21:40:53 GMT
I managed to build and install deb files for the 4.19 kernel and header files on bullseye:  I did not really do it "the official Debian way tho", I am still working on that. Did not really do any testing other than to see if it booted up. |
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That's the gpu on my athlon 64, and fyi the last ubuntu to offer it was 16.04; it wasn't in bionic. There was a way to apply a patch and make it work in bionic and I did that, but it caused glitchy graphics problems, so I ended up just using noveau. [