Exercise in Amusement

[Bill Campbell]

On Sun, Sep 30, 2007, Matthew Carpenter wrote:
>I recently inherited an old IBM ThinkPad 600E (300MHz and all!)  tha tI built 
>for a friend a year or two ago.  Not that fast, but with 228M RAM and a 20gb 
>drive it makes a fun little test bed.
>
>As an exercise in amusement, I decided to upgrade from Ubuntu Hoary directly 
>to Gutsy.  That's 5.04 to 7.10.
>
>Aside from a few cases where file ownership changed from one package to 
>another one that was still installed (ugh) things seemed to go pretty 
>smoothly.  Except after rebooting...
>
>I was having issues with hal starting up so I rebooted, only to be dumped to a 
>failsafe mode in the initrd because /dev/hda5 no longer existed!  Apparently 
>I had BIOS age issues.  I got this error message: BIOS age (1999) fails 
>cutoff (2000).  Must use acpi=force to enable ACPI.  
>
>I appended acpi=force onto the command line with not joy.  However, 
>from "initramdisk" mode I was able to "cat /proc/partitions" and noticed that 
>the new kernel *now* classified the hard drive as "/dev/sda".
>
>Change root=/dev/hda5 to "root=/dev/sda5" and appended "acpi=force" and we're 
>back underway...  hal did then install correctly :)

Yet another example of Linux/FOSS developers not understanding backward
compatibility!  Changing fundamental things like /dev/hdx to /dev/sdx is
just evil unless one takes the time to recognize and support the old system
on updates.

I used a ThinkPad 600 from Aug 1999 until early in 2007 when I got a
Titanium Powerbook.  I ran all current versions of Caldera OpenLinux on the
TP600, switching to SuSE 8.x Professional in 2002 or so, updating SuSE Pro
through 9.2.  Later versions required more RAM (with kde) than was
available.  SuSE 10.0 ran, but didn't recognize CardBus cards due to
interrupt problems.

Bill
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