Re: [tlug] Modprobe error

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Dave" == Dave M G <Dave> writes:

    Dave> Might it not be just as good an approach to keep upgrading,
    Dave> and boot to an earlier kernel when things don't work as
    Dave> expected?

Yes, that's good thinking.  But probably no better.  Compatibility
runs both backward and forward.  *If* you religiously keep your last
kernel ready to boot, this may work fairly well.  But what is fairly
likely to happen is that the new kernel will pull in a new version of
one of those kernel-dependent apps, and that version will be
incompatible with the old kernel.

If you're at the bleeding edge (and you seem to be, since your "toys"
occasionally "magically" start working with an upgrade), the highest
probability approach is to use a source-based system, and anything
that doesn't work after an upgrade you rebuild from scratch.

Whether this is worth it or not is another question.  However, I will
say that I rebuilt half my system (anyway, it seemed like that, since
I got the X11R7 X.org bump mixed in) last week, at the expense of 2
minutes of waffling over "do I really want to upgrade 1300 packages in
one shot?"  Other than that, no problems, and no attention to the box.
You don't have to "geek out" to build from source, just learn a few
admin tools that "Just Users" don't normally deal with.

What distro?  Gentoo, of course.  (Well, NetBSD works that way too,
but that's a whole 'nother barrel of Kool-Aid.)  Josh will be glad to
help![1]

It's not a guarantee you'll have no problems.  I just think it's your
best shot at getting your toys working with minimal effort.  It's
significantly more effort to learn it than either your current policy
or the "keep upgrading and boot to old kernel in case of trouble
policy", but the ongoing admin effort should not be terribly high.


Footnotes: 
[1]  Don't look at me, I don't know anything about Gentoo beyond
"emerge life-the-universe-and-everything"!  It does make me nervous
that the process doesn't return "42", but I guess "0" is acceptable.[2]

[2]  I guess I should say that footnote [1] is not useful content,
it's pure josh-ijime. :-)  You are kibozing the spool, aren't you Josh?

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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              ask what your business can "do for" free software.