Sunday, August 3, 2008

2.6.26.1 Kernel and my D830

Today, I decided it was time to load up the latest kernel onto my laptop(Dell Latitude D830), because I heard that the WiFi LED finally works, and I didn't feel like doing any real work.

Whenever there is a new kernel, my two biggest fears are the Cisco VPN client and VMWare modules. Both of those always break, and sure enough, they were busted. Fortunately, I was able to fix the Cisco issue by applying this patch. That was the easy part....

VMWare ended up being more of a pain, because of some additional changes in 2.6.26.1 proc-fs. The first thing I had to do was get the latest any-any VMWare modules from here. This works fine on 2.6.26, but to make it work on 2.6.26.1, I hacked up a quick patch to vmblock. You have to untar the vmblock.tar in the any-any package, and apply this patch. Tar it back up, run vmware-config.pl, and you might be in business. The last thing that got me was that I needed to change a couple of kernel config parameters for modules that I never noticed before. If your modules are compiling, but not loading, go to menuconfig for your kernel, check Enable loadable module support->Forced module loading and Module versioning support. Make sure they are selected and recompile. You'll have to rebuild the other modules too. That did it for me!

Now I have my WiFi LED!

Links: VMWare Module Topic, Cisco VPN Topic

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