dutky's Journal: The Unhelpfull Linux Support Community

Ok, either the state of support in the Linux community has gotten a lot worse in recent years, or I've gotten a lot grumpier. Since I was pretty grumpy to begin with, I'll have to lay the blame at the feet of the Linux community.

So, if anyone is reading this journal, they will know that I just built a new Linux box and installed a recent version of Slackware on it. I found out, too late, that Linux doesn't directly support AC97 sound cards (not that I had much choice: all the motherboards I considered had built-in AC97 audio), so I went on another little adventure build ALSA for the 2.4 kernel.

The available documentation on building ALSA is less than stellar, so much so, in fact, that I gave up on building for 2.4 and went directly to 2.6 (which I wanted to do anyhow). But that's now what I'm here to talk to you about tonight. (queue Arlo Guthrie: "I'm here to talk about the Draft") I'm here to talk about kernel booting errors.

Specifically, I'm here to talk about the error message "No Setup Signature Found..." The message itself is less than helpful, especially since there is no discussion of setup signatures in the Linux documentation (not that is immediately evident, at least).

After pawing through the Documentation directory in the linux source for a while, I gave up and did a web search. The results, for the most part, were less than helpful: Most of the responses to questions concerning the "No Setup Signature Found..." message were too vague to be of any use, even if they had been even close to correct: one response claimed that the question couldn't be answered because the CPU on which the kernel was built had been overclocked. Another response blamed the failure to run lilo on the new configuration. Another suggested a configuration or compilation error.

The correct answer came from an OP in response to his own question: This is really not an acceptable level of support. It's really not so unlikely that technically underpowered users will be building and installing their own kernels: mainly because custom kernels are pretty much required to get proper hardware support. It's not just kernel configuration either, almost any software that doesn't come with your distribution requires a modicum of development and administrative expertise. Without a reasonable level of community support, it is nearly impossible to figure out what needs to be done or how to do it, even for experienced developers (like myself).

Anyhow, the answer to the "No Setup Signature Found..." message was simply this: The kernel image was empty. I had built a bzip2 compressed image (bzImage) but had copied the regular compressed image (zImage) into /boot. Obviously, since the make zImage had failed, it had not written a complete zImage file (why is there any zImage file? Either the zImage shouldn't be built at all or the incomplete zImage should be deleted when the build fails) which I then tried to boot from.

Even if the build process, leaving the incomplete bzImage around to trip up the unwary, can be justified, the cryptic error message from Lilo (or whoever is generating that message) is inexcusable. Given the abominable level of foresight on the part of the kernel and lilo coders, there is a positive requirement for the Linux support community to be more helpful to unfortunate users suffering through this mess.

If, as a community, we can't be patient and helpful with the folks we have already convinced to take a look at Linux, we deserve to be stomped into the dirt by Microsoft, SCO, and whoever else wants to take a shot at us. We are supposed to be better than them, to treat our users (nay, not users, not even customers, but comrades and friends) with respect. If we can't even do that, we don't deserve world-domination.