[gobolinux-users] General admin questions

[Sean Russell]

Hey,

I ran into some issues putting Gobo on my laptop, and I'd like to either 
find a resource that answers these.  I browsed around in the Gobo 
website -- the FAQ seems under-populated, nobody apparently uses the 
forums, and a search of the mailing list didn't turn up answers to the 
ones that I checked for.

1) I have an IPW2200 chip, and the Gobo kernel is compiled with the 
IPW2200 driver, but the driver requires firmware.  I couldn't find a 
package for the firmware (is there one?), and then I discovered that I 
couldn't locate a firmware directory anywhere on the system -- which I 
thought strange.  I copied the firmwares over from my Gentoo partition 
and stuffed them into /lib/firmware, which worked, but seems like an 
awful hack.

2) Are there any instructions for compiling one's own kernel?  That is, 
where do the sources live, etc.  I eventually used Compile to download 
the sources and interrupted the build process, and then tracked down 
the unpacked sources in Files, where I configured and compiled it 
myself... but, again, this seems like the Wrong Thing To Do.

3) Where's software suspend?  The 2.6 kernel comes with a native 
software suspend... but I couldn't find a configuration option for it 
in the Gobo 2.6 kernel.  I have a hard time that some patch is removing 
it... what am I missing?

4) Is there a document somewhere that lists all of the Gobo-specific 
package management commands?  For example, is there a command for 
removing a package?  Sure you can rm -rf the package, but that doesn't 
remove symbolic links.  How about searching for available recipes, or 
binaries?  Again, if this is commonly done with simple command line 
tools, then is there any documentation about *where* to look?  I'm 
happy to write utility shell scripts for simplifying tasks like this, 
but I suspect that I'm just ignorant about existing tools for 
performing operations like this.  I didn't see any obvious list of 
how-to's for any of these, and they aren't mentioned in the "common 
tasks" page.

5) Finally, is there any documentation on the init system?  My laptop 
requires a number of configurations (setting up the touch-screen, 
keymapping special keys, etc.), and I'd like to know where to hook into 
the init system.  It seems Just Wrong to hack the init script itself -- 
that can only end it tears, next time I upgrade.

I'm sure that I'll have more, but I have to solve these first before my 
laptop becomes usable under Gobo on a day-to-day basis.

Entirely unrelated, has anybody looked at Debians event-based init 
system, Upstart?  If there's no current effort being made to port it to 
Gobo, then I'll give it a shot.  Otherwise, I'd appreciate the parties 
working on it to speak up, so that I can give a hand.

Thanks!

---- SER

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