More rants of a dead man

Dkms tries to solve the problem of updating 3rd party kernel modules when a new kernel is installed.
It might work but it seems on redhat and centos installations there’s also another script called weak-modules.
The purpose of weak-modules is to detect if an existing kernel module built for one kernel is compatible with a newly installed kernel and won’t bother recompiling the module if it thinks the existing build is compatible with the new kernel. It makes a symlink from the new module’s location to the old built copy of the module.
The problem is that weak-modules doesn’t work very well.

What it does is compare the symbol table of the two kernels as they relate to the symbols used by the kernel module. If there are no changes to any of the symbols that the kernel module uses, it assumes they’re compatible and makes a symlink and dkms won’t try and build it against the new kernel headers.

Depending on the kernel module, the result can be that you upgrade your kernel, and when you reboot, you get a kernel panic, with the name of the module as the problem. The module didn’t do anything wrong, the weak-modules script did.

So if you upgrade your kernel and you’re unlucky enough to have a kernel module loaded that isn’t affected by any of the symbols that did change in the new kernel, you could end up with a computer that won’t boot anymore.

Acidrip is installed by xubuntu by default. I think it’s the default dvd ripper.
Somebody changed one of the underlying tools that acidrip uses so that it can no longer enumerate the list of chapters on a dvd. So you can’t get a chapter list so you can’t rip a dvd with acidrip. Acidrip, the default dvd ripper is now useless.
I checked this out and it seems there’s an extra newline after each line of response from the chapter enumerator. Whatever, doesn’t matter, it breaks acidrip and you can’t rip dvds.

Recently I found that xubuntu on my laptop would not show me the desktop after waking up.
Second or third try it would work. But it seems this is a known problem and the solution is to uninstall lightlocker and install xscreensaver.
So somebody broke lightlocker and now its almost useless. It doesn’t get fixed and it doesn’t get removed as the default screen lock handler, you just end up with a laptop that won’t reliably wake up.