Ubuntu Jaunty is good on the Link

[HDRaptor]

The hilarious irony is that I later found there were several core files - $deity only knows why - in my home dir!!     

Clearing those up got me back nearly a gig.  It's probably a good thing they were there, ironically - otherwise I might have filled the space with packages that I became accustomed to.  :]

Now, here's where it gets really funny - after clearing all that up, I was still shy ~20 megs!  Luckily, that wasn't much of an issue to clean up.  It's odd; the upgrade process itself suggests the 'apt-get clean' process when it fails due to space - I did both apt-get & aptitude (I know, they probably do the exact same thing but since I wasn't sure I was ocd-careful  ) clean & autoclean, and an autoremove under apt-get.  I got no free space back.  :/

Once I got that done, I let the download start last night & went to bed.  Will update more as things progress.

Oh - this is an open question to everyone, especially Neuros folks - should I re-enable the Neuros repositories once I've got all this settled?  Or will that remove/downrev packages they "disagree" with?  If I do, should I edit & substitute 'jaunty' for every occurrence of 'intrepid'?

Thanks again Quagga, and all you good folks, for your time & help...

[HDRaptor]

Ok, major fail time.     :'(

The Link stops booting after a certain USB message (can get you the exact text, but it's something along the lines of "choice 1 out of 1").  I was initially guessing it's a grub issue...although, all the volume IDs seem to be aimed right according to vol_id, and dropping to a command line in the grub menu, I can use 'find' to find arbitrary files that I know the exact path to. This happens only during boot to kernel 2.6.28.  Booting to 2.6.27 sort of works, although the only way to a desktop is via "low resolution" mode... Booting from a different device altogether (a stick with an older 1.1 image on it) lets me fsck and mount both the /boot and /root partitions of the questionable installation, and read/write files there w/o apparent issue. But for the life of me I cannot figure out how to boot that 2.6.28 install now. I even booted to the lower kernel & manually ran update-initramfs and update-grub...no errors, but didn't help.
 
Upon further reflection and investigation I'm starting to believe this has nothing to do with grub; it's some sort of kernel failure. The menu.lst entries between 2.6.27 and 28 are identical, except for 27 vs. 28 (and loading a different initrd, of course). Now, I think I'm further along the trail, because I noticed during boot for 28 a message comes up squalling about being unable to find /lib/modules/2.6.28-11-generic/modules.dep (and I can see how that'd be a screaming trainwreck if it wasn't there).  But it is.  Or, at least, when I boot under 27 I can easily see that, and other files in that dir. :\  Now, here's the real kicker:  at boottime, at a command prompt in grub - I can also find that file.  So you'd think the rest of the boot process would be able to!!  Assuming it's really the problem...  Furthermore, that find returns the same partition for that modules.dep as other unique files in neurostv's home dir in the same filesystem, so I'm pretty sure it's looking at the right one and not some "internal" one or something.

I have done a lot of googling, and everything I've tried thus far has failed.   

I've manually run update-initramfs & update-grub as per above.  Also ran mkinitramfs.  No help.  (I can bring back the exact switches to these if you want, but basically they were all appropriate to 2.6.28-11).

I've tried manually reinstalling the kernel twice now with aptitude (second time just using linux-image-generic).  No help.

At least I'm learning a fair bit about kernels, now.   :/  cat /proc/modules, when I'm dropped to the busybox, yields a lot fewer modules than when I'm at even the singleuser mode of the previous kernel (which is where I'm doing most of my troubleshooting.)  I just don't know what to do about this.  I'm afraid to run depmod since there's already a modules.dep in there, and I haven't really got a clue about how it works (although I may get desperate and just make a copy of modules.dep and do it anyways).

I'm just getting really frustrated, and my head is running in circles about this at this point.   I'm at the bleeding edge of my understanding of linux, and my googling, and it's failing me.    Any & all help is extremely appreciated - thank you all.

[quagga]

Well, based on that info I would say that my best guess for what is happening is that the kernel boots, and then can't find the initrd to load all of the modules needed to get the system going.  Without that, you end up in busybox shell hell.  You didn't switch the filesystem around or anything?  ext4 it up?  I know that causes some grub issues. 

When you updated, did you use update-manager?  And are the repos pointed at neuros still or the master ubuntu repos?  I've never actually tried updating the neuros software.  I think I booted it once and the usb key is still sitting by my tv, but I started with a vanilla Ubuntu install as I knew what I wanted.  Having a HD in the unit also makes life easier. 

Honestly, my suggestions probably aren't that helpful to you.  I would either buy another USB stick and try a regular jaunty install and see how that fairs, or wait for neuros to release a 9.04 based link software release.  Another option might be to see if XBMC has a 9.04 release. 

[HDRaptor]

Well, I got past it.  Don't ask me to try to remember the full chain of logic (or something  ) that got me here...should really stop troubleshooting late at night, probably.  :]

Quagga, to answer a few of your questions:  yes, I used update-manager, and NO, I absotively did not touch ext4.  I'm really impressed by some of the performance reviews I've seen so far, and I may change the media partition on our hard drive (still haven't gotten around to installing the OS there yet :/ - that's a project and thread for another day ) to it, but...not ready to go there yet.  Also, as I said before, the process update-manager starts seems to kill any other repository(ies) than Canonical's, so...still haven't re-enabled neuros's yet.  I suppose I will eventually.

Turns out that if I just do a 'modprobe usb-storage' at the initramfs prompt, wait a bit for its messages to go by, and then type exit - boot proceeds (relatively) normally.  First boot it told me I had a graphics problem, but when I got to the "low-res" desktop, I deactivated fglrx from the "restricted drivers manager" under system/administration, and then rebooted.

Et voila!!  I never got around to going through the steps to make the display "fill to edge" on our TV - but now I don't have to!!  Whatever default Ubuntu wants to do for that card seems to be performing admirably.  I guess that's just the same xorg driver, a few revs down, that you pulled with git, Quagga?  In any case it seems to be a little more zippy than the old driver, manufacturer cooperation or not.  720p x.264 mkvs play nicely as always, but the real kicker is that a 1280 one, that previously choked up horrendously without -lavdopts skiploopfilter=all, was very nearly watchable "raw", and with skiploopfilter on, almost never glitched.  I used to avoid high-bitrate 1080s like the plague; now I'm gonna have to grab a few and test them out!

I'd like to figure out why the boot process is burping at that point, given it seems to have all the tools it needs to continue, but I'm sure that can be ironed out eventually.

Quagga, I very much appreciate your suggestions, actually...any help is appreciated.

Honestly, it was pretty dim of me not to back up the stick using selfimage, or dd or something, before pulling a change of this magnitude.  Well, live & learn (to not troubleshoot/tinker at 3am.  )

[quagga]

Ah how about that.  For some reason it doesn't know that it has to load usb-storage to access your hard drive.  I'd imagine that is correctable but I'm not sure how.  I'd consider asking ubuntuforums or something.  My first suggestion would be to add usb-storage to /etc/modules. 

ext4 is nice, however it has a soft-fail issue yet.  They think it is race condition.  Basically RM'ing lots of stuff leads to a system freeze.  The developer of the FS is looking into it.  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/330824?comments=all

Not sure why fglrx isn't working for you but yes, the radeon driver is quite nice these days.  It is probably a bit more zippy as the OS driver reads EDID info a bit better.  fglrx seems to default to running at 1080p and then downscalling to reach the screen unless you tell it to just use X resolution.  Basically, the radeon driver is smarter.  They're both actually created largely by ATI/AMD.  Eventually the OS driver should catch up. 

[HDRaptor]

Well, just to let folks know, I got ALL my problems sorted at once, and fixed some additional ones too!   

I'm gonna start a new thread with the methodology, so as to help as many people as possible who come across this!!