Kernels in Debian

[Kerry Hoath]

For reasons I am unclear on people seem to be alergic to initial ramdisks in 
modern Linux distributions.

The reason initial ramdisks are used in modern distributions is so that you 
can load modules required for boot devices, allow time for USB devices to 
settle before using them.

An initrd allows boot from raid and lvm, it also gives you a recovery 
environment in ram that does not rely on your disk systems.
It also allows partitions to be identified by uuid which will allow drives 
to change ids without the system becoming unbootable.

I seem to recall that kernel-package expects to build initial ram disks and 
unless you bypass the build machinery it might not be easy to switch off.
Once speakup integrates more seamlessly into Debian and it's getting better 
all the time then kernel package will be something worth sticking with for 
speakup.


I doubt it is the initrd that is preventing your large screens; you need to 
pass the option to the kernel as part of grub configuration and then run 
update-grub to copy it through the rest of the file.

I might look harder into this on the holidays although I run ubuntu not 
Debian.
Regards, Kerry.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Holmes" <steve at holmesgrown.com>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2008 9:59 PM
Subject: Re: Kernels in Debian


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> Thanks Tony for that good summary of steps.  I also looked around in
> the /usr/share/doc/kernel-package (I believe it's called) and there
> was a good write-up there too.  Your steps confirmed my observation
> about where to put the speakup/*.ko modules.  I found out the hard way
> I had to mv them down to the speakup directory.  I would have thought
> the 'make modules_install' would have done this directly.
>
> I'll have to read up on modules-assistent.  I didn't do anything in
> that area yesterday and speakup is working for me.  I did install the
> kernel headers; I'll have to take stock of the kernel stuff I did
> install but I had not untarred the source tree yet.  I'm currently
> satisfied with using modules right now.  I may eventually go with a
> strait kernel with one speakup module included and bypass initrd
> completely.  Personally, I wonder about the usefullness of a initrd on
> a large desktop of my own.  I suppose those are good for smaller
> systems where decisions have to be made as to which modules to
> include.
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