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Journal Morosoph's Journal: Ask Teh Slashdot 4

First, an entertaining story.

The night before last, I was attempting to get a game compiled to run in 64 bits on my Opteron. It was a ridiculous hour, but I was going to get it working before I went to bed, dammit!

Well, okay, not a good start. I found that SDL_GL_SWAP_CONTROL wasn't recogised, and that I needed to upgrade my SDL libraries to at least version 1.2.10. So I fired up the trusty Yum Extender widget on my Fedora 5 box, and found that I couldn't get it... Unless I pulled from the development repository, which I did.

SDL-1.2.11-2 was to be had, but required at updated glibc. So, without much thought, I grabbed the latest one, and set the game compiling again, and indeed it got a lot further, until the compile got to this line:

/usr/lib64/libSDL.so: file not recognized: File format not recognized

I had grabbed a glibc that was too advanced. Version 2.6.3; well, I had no intension of running cutting edge code anyway, so I erased the files.

rpm -e glibc.2.6.3.x86_64 glibc.2.6.3.i386

Which turned out to be pretty dumb. I had managed to strip the basic subsystem out of my machine. Applications that were running would keep running; no new apps would start.

So (I was tired, remember), I rebooted. Naturally, the boot baulked at the first opportunity. I reset the machine to an install disk to "upgrade" the system to the Fedora 5 base system, but /dev/md1 (the boot sector) wasn't clean, and I was instructed to boot up my system and sort out the problem before attempting an upgrade (sensible advice, but frustrating).

I finally solved this problem after a very short night's sleep (3 hours) by using my Fedora rescue CD, not chrooting (doh!) and fscking the /boot partition. The rescue CD wouldn't let me unmount /dev/md2 (AKA /, the root partition), so I just hoped that all would be well... And it was! Reinstalling the base system happened pretty quickly.

Well, I had been running kernel 2.6.18, which ran all my hardware (including the memory card reader), and generally did the job. But fedora 5 begins with kernel 2.6.15, which means that unless I upgrade, I can't read in an artist friend of mine's photos to use on his website.

Can you get kernel 2.6.18 (Fedora, x86_64) for love or money? Well, I tried for a little too long, but eventually gave up. If I try to upgrade to 2.6.20, this happens; I remember something similar happening last time that I attempted this.

Well, my mission to you, should you choose to accept it, is to locate for me kernel-1.2.6.18_1.2257.fc5 for the x86_64, or else to help me get my SATA RAID 5 partition detected on boot by kernel 2.6.20; Am I missing important kernel options, say?

Thanks in advance!
~Tim (Morosoph)

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  • Will this do?

    kernel-2.6.18-1.2257.fc5.x86_64.rpm [rpmseek.com]

    Incidentally, the "correct" way to solve your original problem would have probably been to boot up the rescue disk and use its copy of rpm (with the alternate root option, -r) to reinstall your original version of the glibc package(s). I am a bit surprised that RPM let you simply remove a basic system library without so much as a warning; I believe apt-get is rather more verbose when it comes to removing core dependencies on Debian-based systems.

    • I thought that you'd done it there, but sadly, the download link is a non-existent file :o(

      Looking in the directory [cnlab-switch.ch], kernel 2.6.20 is there, but no show for 2.6.18; it's been obsoleted, as it appears to have been everywhere.

      Thanks for your tip. The install DVD didn't try to install too much, so I'm fairly happy. And yes, I should have used yum, or else rpm --oldpackage. I was pretty surprised to see the system fall over the way it did. It sounds like apt-get would have warned me properly, but then

      • My apologies. I didn't think to check the link; I assumed they had some kind of script to removed things from the database when the files disappeared, like most other sites do.

        I can't believe they removed the RPMs from the official repositories so quickly, much less that no one else seems to have a mirror. Debian still has kernels going back to 2.6.16 (at least for x86); I guess that's why I use Debian rather than Fedora -- when something breaks you have a chance of finding a suitable package to fix it wi

        • mkinitrd --preload=raid456 /boot/initrd-2.6.18-1.2257.fc5.img 2.6.18-1.2257.fc5.img

          Problem solved! BTW, I did locate kernel-2.6.18 [pbone.net], but it didn't do me any good; I had to do something like this to get it working last time in any case, and I only found what with a lucky needle-in-a-haystack hit from Google search. I've not been impressed with the quality of results when researching this kind of problem.

          At least this time I knew to search for something to do with "456", which didn't really get there.

The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the `social sciences' is: some do, some don't. -- Ernest Rutherford

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