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dRock was started in January 2001. To create a CD that contains all desktop packages we missed in ROCK Linux. In the beginning of 2001 we maintained the tree to be used in a small group of people - it was moderately updated when we missed something. After giving away many CDs and coding GSMP in the summer we decided to make the project more official and to work on a final 1.4.0 release. Since I had far too much to do in September/October we canceled the feature-freeze (sorry). Valentin and I definitely like to get a gcc 3.0.x system for C++ development and so we decided to make dRock the first gcc-3 based distribution ;-)!
But the results in November showed that it is not yet stable enough. I got crashing pdksh, corrupted binaries ... And no official glibc was known to work (or at least compile) with the gcc-3. - So we switched back to the good old gcc-2 for a stable base. - Although our latest build showed that it was not only gcc-3 which failed, but the two year old pdksh and some ungood combination of architecture arguments for gcc ... - Anyway we completed the 1.4.0 release with the gcc-2. (Let's better get a stable system ;-) Two other arguments against the current gcc-3.0.2: 1) The binaries are getting much bigger (10%-30% ??) and 2) the gcc-3.0.2 doesn't yet generate valid code for some static C arrays and the C++ dynamic_cast.
But after very much work in November and December I was able to release our first stable release 1.4.0 on December the 18th 2001 - just before Christmas and the upcoming 18th Chaos Communication Congress!
- the /dev and /proc entries are missing in the automatically generated /etc/fstab. The system works anyway - but you get a warning during system startup. Simply add them yourself:
none /dev devfs defaults 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
- our example /etc/modules.conf is accidentally named /etc/modules.conf.example, has a typo and misses a line for the ppp (Point To Point Tunneling Protocol) modules. Make sure you have:
alias ppp ppp_generic
alias tty-ldisc-3 ppp_async
in it.
- the regular expression matching of the devfsd has changed (again). Now you need a real regular expression to only match normal files (and not the directories. Example:
REGISTER snd/.* PERMISSIONS root.root 666
- the shipped XFree 4.1.0 is not able to use many newer ATI cards (incl. the Radeon > 7000 and some ATI 128 cards. They are all very well supported in the 4.2.0rc2 CVS version - and we are simply waiting for the XFree-4.2.0 release in the next weeks ...
- Because the installed kernel is the one also used on the install-disks, it has only very limited features compiled in ... For the onces not so familiar with kernel-builds a better kernel .config example can be found here. Copy it to /usr/src/linux/.config and use make dep clean bzImage modules to compile a new kernel. The created kernel is arch/i386/boot/bzImage to /boot/kernel-. And configure your boor-loader to load it (man lilo or grub ...).
- The install-disk kernel has accidentally support for USB-storage devices. So if you have a flash-card reader, a USB hard disk, a USB camera or ... plugged on the USB they will appear as first SCSI devices - and your SCSI controller will become a host[1,2,...] after you insmod the SCSI module. Linux USB rocks - but this sucks :-(!
- If you have problems with Galeon (table corruption) you might have been using and older version of it and incompatible configuration settings are in your .galeon, .gconf and .gconfd in your home directory. Try to fix them, or (if you are sure not to loose important data!!!) delete this dirs, and start configuring galeon from the beginning. - Sorry.
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