Johnny Hughes wrote:

Robert wrote:

...

The latest CentOS 5 kernel, 2.6.18-8.1.15.el5 broke my box and I had to drop back to 2.6.18-8.1.14.el5 before I could play DVDs with either Xine or mplayer. ( xine-0.99.5-1.el5.rf & mplayer-1.0-0.36.rc1try2.el5.rf ). This is no big deal to me -- as long as I can make certain that the older kernel doesn't go away. If I understand the installonly plugin correctly, an entry of tokeep=4 in /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/installonlyn.conf will cause yum to leave the working kernel in place through 2 more upgrades. Aside from setting tokeep to an insanely large value, is there any way to insure that yum will concern itself only with installing updates, allowing me to deal with tossing the old stuff? Also, is my understanding of the "tokeep" value in installonlyn.conf correct?

Yes ... you can just turn that plugin off

set enabled=0 in installonlyn.conf and it will never delete a kernel.

You could also add this to the CentOS-Base.repo file in /etc/yum.repos.d/ in the [Base] and [updates] sections:

exclude=kernel kernel-headers kernel-devel kernel-PAE* kernel-xen*

then you will have to manually upgrade your kernels ... if you wanted that.

I will test the DVD playback issues and see if I can duplicate them.

Thanks, Johnny Hughes

Don't spend any time on it. You might or might not be able to duplicate the problem. The bug is a bug only to the extent that a new kernel really shouldn't cause previously working stuff to suddenly fail. I think it goes back to the way device allocation rules seem to be a moving target.

Using the previous kernel:

[root@mavis dev]# uname -r 2.6.18-8.1.14.el5 [root@mavis dev]# ls -l dvd* lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Nov 4 12:39 dvd -> hdc lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Nov 4 12:39 dvd-hdc -> hdc lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Nov 4 12:39 dvd-hdd -> hdd lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Nov 4 12:39 dvdrw -> hdc lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Nov 4 12:39 dvdrw-hdc -> hdc lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Nov 4 12:39 dvdwriter -> hdc lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Nov 4 12:39 dvdwriter-hdc -> hdc [root@mavis dev]#

Using the new kernel:

[root@mavis dev]# uname -r 2.6.18-8.1.15.el5 [root@mavis dev]# ls -l dvd* lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Nov 4 12:05 dvd -> hdd lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Nov 4 12:05 dvd-hdc -> hdc lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Nov 4 12:05 dvd-hdd -> hdd lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Nov 4 12:05 dvdrw -> hdc lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Nov 4 12:05 dvdrw-hdc -> hdc lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Nov 4 12:05 dvdwriter -> hdc lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Nov 4 12:05 dvdwriter-hdc -> hdc [root@mavis dev]#

So that the generated symlink for dvd now points to a different drive. The workaround for xine is to change the value of media.dvd.device in ~/.xine/config accordingly:

[rj@mavis .xine]$ grep -B3 media.dvd.device config

# device used for DVD playback # string, default: /dev/dvd media.dvd.device:/dev/dvd-hdc [rj@mavis .xine]$

So, it's really nothing for me to get my skivvies in a wad over but it is a bit annoying when stuff suddenly quits working.

Regards