Looooong Horror story, 10.04.4 LTS on an amd turion 64 bit laptop version

[Gene Heskett]

Greetings all;

Yesterday, I pulled my laptop out of the case for the first time in several 
months. So it was not 'uptodate'.

As usual, I had a hell of a time making networking work and finally in my 
putzing around I made wlan1 work, which is a usb interfaced 802/11 linksys 
thingy.  With a cat5 plugged directly into a hub in the shop (my whole 
place is wired, plus 2 wireless AP's), I could not get an eth0 connection 
even when doing 'static'.  I think it was looking for IPv6 and rejecting 
IPv4, which all of my local 192.168.xx.xx net is.  No IPv6 has made it to 
my neighborhood anyway.  FWIW I have had to disable ipv6 stuff in 2 of the 
other 4 machines here in order to make ipv4 usable, using the recipe at

<http://www.webupd8.org/2010/05/how-to-disable-ipv6-in-ubuntu-1004.html>

I used a procedure which installed a custom combo of kernel 3.5.7 + 
xenomai, which appeared to install without any gotchas.  But when I was 
done, I noted the update-manager had checked & wanted to update some stuff, 
so before rebooting, I let it, 209 packages total.

One of the packages I saw go by was grub.  Since I have 4 other machines 
here running this same install cd, and they aren't having any grub problems 
I didn't think anything of it.

The update-manager finished, I had it recheck, nothing left to do so I 
rebooted.

No grub menu, and it tried to boot straight into the new 3.5.7+xenomai 
kernel, doing a kernel panic .6 seconds later when it wasn't able to mount 
sda1 as boot.  NDI why.  Wash with power button, rinse and repeat for 
probably 50 stop-starts on the hard drive while looking for the magic 
keyboard combo to bring up the grub menu.  Go on IRC asking, get told quite 
a few as it seems few actually knew, and about an hour later finally hit on 
left shift+ctl, dancing on that at powerup finally gets me the grub menu.

Boot to old kernel, a custom built 2.6.32+RTAI kernel as this install cd is 
a custom spin from the linuxcnc.org site that we have been running CNC 
machining tools with since 10.04 LTS came out.  IOW, well tested, rock 
solid.

No networking at all, usb detection of my plugging in the radio dongle is 
not recorded in dmesg, not a peep.  This lappy has a built in radio, but 
its a bcm4318, and not even the windows drivers have ever been able to make 
it work reliably.  It is disabled in the bios but that didn't stop dmesg 
from mewling about it.

Its well known that the version of network-manager in 10.04 LTS is broken, 
no support for wpa_supplicant, and despite my requests over the last 3 
years, no update to that has been done, so it usually gets disabled and 
host file based 'static' is configured in /etc/network/interfaces.  Even 
that isn't working now.

So, I will probably wind up re-installing from that same cd when I can find 
a copy.  Several laying around in the midden heap a working machine shop 
can become but I've not excavated that deep yet.

But what was done to grub that makes it bypass the menu, and what was done 
to the networking or to udev to totally disable it?

Also, rebooting to test a network config change is a PIMA, so what is the 
ubuntu equivalent of "sudo service network restart"?

Thanks for any advice here. I'd like to fix it rather than re-install.  
Heck, I might even learn something!
  
Cheers, Gene
-- 
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core error - bus dumped
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