finally got ydl2.2 installed on G4/867 - but now no X :(

[R Shapiro]

As everyone probably knows by now, the standard YDL2.2 installers,
text or X, don't work on the G4/867 because of problems in the kernel
included on the cd.  I _know_ Yellow Dog knows this, though for some
reason they've elected not to mention it anywhere on their web site.
The old 2.2.19 kernel on the cd, and the installers that use it, can
complete an installation successfully, but that kernel doesn't really
run with the new YDL environment

Sometime ago a fairly straightforward solution occured to me: use one
of the old 2.2.19 installers on the YDL2.2 cd to install YDL2.2 on its
own partition, then copy over the 2.4.19-pre8-ben0 kernel and modules
from my YDL2.1 installation.  YDL support dissuaded me from doing
this, but I had a little time today so I gave it a shot.

The good news is that almost everything works fine.  The bad news is
that the one thing that doesn't work is X, with or without the nv
accelerator.  This is very mysterious to me.  My YDL2.1 installation
has the same XFree (4.2.0-6.30d), the same kernel, the same
XF86Config-4 and many of the same core packages (including glibc).
The accelerated server works fine there.  In YDL2.2 I can't get _any_
X configuration to work, accelerated or not.  The specific error
that's killing X with nv is also very odd: it's unhappy with the mouse
section of the config file, or so it says in the log.  The result is
that the X server quits and the consoles become invisible, but the
machine is still up and running.  I can type blindly at the console or
connect via ssh etc.  In other words, this is not the usual nv driver
bug that hangs the machine.


Anyone have any suggestions, or ideas about what difference between
2.1 and 2.2 might be causing trouble?





-- 
rshapiro@bbn.com