Josh Saddler

In the past couple of days I finally managed to kick my system into upgrading to Gnome 2.12 (x86).

The problem is that I'd been using an old out-of-tree version of wpa_supplicant (0.3.9!) and an old kernel, gentoo-sources-2.6.12-r9. These were the only recent working versions I could use. Unfortunately, the new gnome-vfs and gnome-volume-manager wanted updates to hal and dbus, which in tern required a kernel >2.6.13, which meant madwifi and wpa_supplicant updates as well. Phew! That's a lot to take in.

Needless to say, none of that happened. Gnome 2.12 has been marked stable for x86 since Jan. 22. That's a long time to be unable to upgrade, and quite frustrating.

I avoided updating my ~unstable madwifi-driver (sorry Brix; I know I promised to test the latest, and I still will), and fixed the WiFi security problem by unmerging wpa_supplicant and just using wireless-tools. Thank goodness my new apartment only uses WEP. I initially tried gentoo-sources-2.6.15-r1, but this would not work with anything else I had installed, basically.

The next problem was the update to stable nvidia and udev. As referenced elsewhere on the forums, udev and nvidia-kernel have some serious issues compounded by a change in the way the kernel handles them in >2.6.12-r9. Udev no longer creates the proper /dev/nvidia* entries when using the new kernels, so of course X can't start on boot. Despite playing with all the masked versions of nvidia, I ended up using the latest stable nvidia (1.0.6629) and the latest ~x86 udev (083 right now). The above forum thread looked promising, but I ended up solving it on my own. After all the updating, all I had to do was change RC_DEVICE_TARBALL to "yes" in /etc/conf.d/rc.

Does the update to Gnome 2.12 mean that I'm no longer running a "pure" udev system? I dunno, but I'm sure glad that keeping the /dev tarballs works. It's a pain to have run /sbin/NVmakedevices.sh after every boot just to use X. I do miss wpa_supplicant, but I don't really need it for a WEP network; wireless-tools works just as well (and a little faster.)

Oh, and the update to dbus brought its share of troubles, as all dbus updates do. The ebuild ought to print out some einfo message like "Remember to run revdep-rebuild -p after emerging". Never once has a dbus update not needed that! Yes, I know it's mentioned in the Gnome 2.12 upgrade guide, but it really should be elsewhere too.

BTW, it's taken a solid half hour (!!) to type this entry and post it, because recompiling k3b (courtesy revdep-rebuild) on this machine is a b**** and slows down keyboard input. It takes 1-3 minutes to see a paragraph finally appear after typing it. Sigh.

Oh, and in non-Gentoo-related news, this morning I went with my fiancee to pick out my wedding band. She'll pick it up on Friday, but of course I won't get to see it until the end of July. :)