A8N-SLI problems on upgrade

[Ivan Gyurdiev]

Hi, I ran into tons of issues trying to upgrade my motherboard (and 
other problems). They're mostly worked around now, but here they are, if 
people are interested (will provide more info if you ask - this is 
essentially a rawhide system with all packages installed):

- the nv driver doesn't work, not even a little bit.
I get vertical stripes on the screen that change color. This is with a 
Nvidia 6800 GS (single card) 256, PCI-E  (that would be NV41). It's 
detected properly, but I get the stripes. As a result, the Fedora 
graphical installer does not work for me. The text installer seemed 
garbled, so I couldn't use that either. Rhgb doesn't work, and neither 
does X.

I am now back to using my favorite nvidia driver, which I had to patch 
for the latest kernels, and make work on modular X. I have yet to figure 
out how to properly rpmbuild the 64-bit version.

- Then I decided to play with my SATA drive, and add it to LVM. This is 
a western digital caviar, 200 MB, SATA II. That was a mistake. 
Ext3online froze twice trying to resize itself following an lvm resize 
(it did work the second time I tried it). On reboot I got a kernel 
panic, because the initrd didn't pull in sd_mod. I tried reinstalling 
the kernel many times, and failed to add that module to initrd every 
single time. Then I hacked mkinitrd to add it, and now things work.

- My monitor was not detected - it's a Sun Microsystems GDM20E20, and 
kudzu did not set its modes properly (in fact, I think kudzu segfaults 
right now).

- My network was not detected/configured by kudzu (is it supposed to 
be)? I'm really not sure if kudzu actually works at all on my machine 
anymore. Then I configured it manually. Then eth0 and eth1 got flipped 
for some reason. I configured them according to what I see aliased in 
modprobe.conf, but the kernel decided to bind them in the exact opposite 
order for some reason.

- I also had the silly idea that I could upgrade from i386 to x86_64, as 
opposed to reinstalling. No such luck. I managed to do it eventually, 
after working with the rescue CD quite a bit. First, you can't run any 
64-bit binaries until you've installed the 64-bit kernel. The initrd for 
this kernel is made client-side, and the command /usr/bin/strip fails to 
work properly on 64-bit modules until upgraded to its x86_64 equivalent. 
This means that no modules of any kind get added to the initrd for a 
64-bit kernel when installed on a 32-bit system. Then there's the issue 
of rpm not understanding any multiarch until you upgrade it. Then after 
upgrading it it does understand multiarch, but gets 2 copies of every 
single package, as upgrade no longer upgrades.... so now I have to prune 
the .i386 ones. Fun things... yum still doesn't get the basearch right, 
I probably haven't gotten to the package that makes it understand yet.

... more info later, I have to run.
However, I think there's lots of room for improvement...