This morning on my backup computer I did a weekly upgrade and as usual lots of packages needed upgrading, but one package hotplug, was marked to be removed and replaced with udev. I knew this was a big leap, I have seen the bug reports for udev and of course the hundreds of posts on the debian-user mailing lists. I thought though that sooner or later I will have to make the switch and let it do the upgrade. When I rebooted, the wireless card didn't come up, there was no sound and no X server. For this machine its not a big deal because I pretty much use it for backing up my other computers, and testing upgrades like today's so that I can see what problems I will have on my main desktop.

The X server wont come up because it cannot find /dev/input/mice, this seemed easy enough to fix, I tried /dev/input/mice, /dev/input/mouse0-3 and /dev/psaux with no success. I guess its moved somewhere? There is no sound because of a missing /dev/dsp, even though its the same device and symlink as on my non udev desktop

armarda:~#  ll /dev/dsp
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2005-04-10 01:22 /dev/dsp -> /dev/dsp0
armarda:~#  play /usr/share/bzflag/missile.wav
sox: Can't open output file '/dev/dsp': No such device

The Atheros wireless won't work because the modules I had compiled are no longer automatically loaded. So I have to manually do

modprobe wlan
modprobe ath_pci
modprobe ath_hal
ifup ath0

This is something I never really understood. When I do a modprobe _foo_ the next time I rebooted, _foo_ was then automatically loaded. I do not know how this happens but it just did. Now I do not know where to look to fix it.

So...some poking around on the web is needed to fix this mess. I think my kernel 2.6.8 might be a problem, I might need a newer one? The other, most tempting option is to remove udev and reinstall hotplug. But if udev is no going to go away, it seems like something I should probably learn to deal with.

In the meantime, my main desktop will sit and wait, I will just put udev on hold for now and update all the other packages. I should mention that because I am running unstable, these things from time to time do happen and I should take it in stride and go find the appropriate documentation.