Now that I got my laptop back, I’ve been trying to get it to work with Ubuntu Edgy. I tried a lot. I spent hours pouring over kernel command line options, to stop the random hangs I was experiencing due to bad interrupt configuring.

Eventually I gave up and decided a new kernel is the only solution.

Ubuntu has a great custom kernel guide, and a git guide. The build took 2 hrs. and Git downloaded well over 100MB. Then I tried to build a restricted modules, and after fighting for a few days, gave up in disgust. My new kernel suffered from the dreaded ati-ixp double speed clock. I tried every option, and in the end, no_timer_check seems to be the one to use.

So I put this in my menu.lst:

And after using that a bit, I upgraded to fiesty anyway, and bricked my system, thanks to a lovely initramfs-tools bug. I now carry around a monolithic kernel (like all my debian boxen use). You just can’t trust initrds…. :-)