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#1 2008-12-24 14:25:29

arch_nemesis
Member
Registered: 2008-12-19
Posts: 115

A hairy moment during kernel upgrade -- Howto avoid in the future?

Yesterday I upgraded my kernel to 2.6.27.10-1, as I'm guessing many others did as well.

As I was watching the output scroll across the screen I saw (as best I can recall) "depmod: command not found".

That rang a bell with me as being important, but of course the upgrade was rolling along and I wasn't sure how to (or whether I should) stop it.

So, by the time I did enough reading to understand that depmod would be responsible (as I understand it) for ensuring my new kernel could access/load all the same modules as the old kernel, the upgrade was done, but I wasn't sure what to do about it.

I rebooted, hoping I'd have a choice of kernels.  Of course I didn't so I gave it a shot anyway -- and of course damn near nothing worked, including nvidia.

So, probably without thinking about what I was potentially doing as much as I should have, I ran depmod -a based on quasi-related issues from another thread here.

That fixed everything, or so it would seem.  In fact, it's improved my boot process since it no longer pauses when loading powernow-k8.  (I'm giving the new kernel credit for that -- I don't know if it really deserves it though.  wink )

Based on this, I have a couple of questions --

What are likely reasons why depmod didn't execute when the kernel installation was going on, as it was apparently supposed to?

Also, was my cavalier "depmod -a" something that could have made things worse?



As a side note, and I don't know whether this is related, at some point when I was first building my arch system last week, I lost the ability to run things like "ifconfig" (for example) without specifying "/sbin/ifconfig".  Since the new kernel has been installed, that capability seems to have been restored.  I'm *guessing* that the kernel installer couldn't run depmod because it would have had to run "/sbin/depmod".  Does this make sense, and how could I have fixed that prior to the kernel upgrade?  I've got some idea that it relates to the "PATH" environment variable, but I've had difficulty following the info I've been able to find on how to edit that variable.

Thanks!

Last edited by arch_nemesis (2008-12-24 14:41:03)

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#2 2008-12-24 15:00:18

string
Member
Registered: 2008-11-03
Posts: 286

Re: A hairy moment during kernel upgrade -- Howto avoid in the future?

Check out: /var/log/pacman.log, you'll be SHOCKED and APPALLED!
Check out: printenv (/usr/bin/printenv)

Your PATH variable needs to include "/sbin", so it should look like: PATH="(stuff):/sbin:(other stuff)".

Some questions: Do you have ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile (~ == /root)? What does "echo $PATH" say when you are logged in as a regular user? What does "echo $PATH" say when you are logged in as root? How do you usually "log in" as root? Via `su`? Are you simply issuing: "$ su" ? Try: "$ su -" instead.

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