Hi,

I'm new to this forum and to smxi. I hope this is the best place to ask this question.

I have debian wheezy on an old laptop (Dell C400 with Intel 830M graphics). I had issues with starting X so I googled and it turns out people have had success with liquorix kernels in the past. I'm trying to install an archived liquorix kernel (3.4.0-14...) that's similar in version to the latest wheezy kernel (3.2.0-4) through smxi but the the process fails when it can't find install-kernel.sh in /usr/local/bin (the file is invoked in sm-lib-kernel-install).

Kindly help. Thanks.

(also any advice for making wheezy work on Dell C400 with Intel 830M is greatly appreciated).
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I double checked, the zip packages for 3.4.35 liquorix both have the install-kernel.sh file in them. I checked the online version as well by downloading them, the file is present.

Unless I made a mistake somewhere in smxi with paths, I don't see how this can happen, and given that every week 50 to 100 people install smxi archived kernels, I would have heard a report on that by now I think, hopefully anyway.

So that leaves your system.

smxi changes cd locations as it moves along, so something is wrong, but I can't tell you where. the file is present in the zip, so it's not wrong there.

Beyond this I can't say much. Try the 3.2 kernel zip and see if the file missing behavior repeats, if it does, you have something very specific to your situation/install which I won't be able to help with since there has to be something fundamentally different, like, for example, an unmounted /usr partition or something like that.
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Thanks for you reply.

I'll double check my system. And try the new kernel. (I was able to have my system functional through a wheezy-backports kernel).

Just for the record here's what I did:

$ cd /usr/local/bin
$ sudo wget -Nc smxi.org/smxi.zip
$ sudo unzip smxi.zip
$ sudo ./smxi

At this point smxi warned me that I can't run it as sudo:

$ sudo su -
# ./smxi

(and then I proceeded with the install)
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Since this is debian, no need to use su.

I knew that
sudo
sudo su

both cause problems with various actions, for example, creating folders, and that would certainly explain the issue you had.

However, it was my impression that sudo su - bypassed these issues, but it's possible there are some cases where it does not.

I can almost guarantee you that if you just login as root:



in other words, no ./smxi is needed since /usr/local/bin is in the system $PATH

That should not cause problems but it might have, I can't say, it shouldn't since smxi explicitly locates itself using cd always to avoid such issues, so the suspect is sudo su -

thanks

everything will work exactly as expected.
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Ok so probably I screwed up because of that.

If I have to start over (since I haven't made any changes to my system through smxi yet), do you think just deleting /usr/local/bin/* and /etc/smxi.conf be enough? (/usr/local/bin was empty before I installed smxi)
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no, you don't need to delete anything, and no, you didn't screw up, I believed that sudo su - was the same functionally as running as root, apparently it isn't.

Just start smxi as root, that's all.

ie:


I also appreciate this very concrete example of why smxi/sgfxi do not permit sudo use, sudo is not what people think it is, it does not cascade permissions down through a script as expected, sometimes it does, and sometimes it does not, as in your case, I believe the zip failed to extract into a directory, or the contents failed to fill that directory.

I may update smxi to just ban all use of sudo, though usually for most cases sudo su - will work fine, just not when you are downloading stuff into a new directory I guess.
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