[theminor]

I'm running XBMC Live on an SSD currently and I'd like to get TRIM support enabled. Unfortounatly, TRIM support was not added to the kernel until version 2.6.33, so merely adding "discard" to fstab does not work using the current kernel that ships with XBMC Live Dharma (2.6.32). It will be necessary to upgrade the kernel to at least 2.6.33 in order to get TRIM working.

I realize this means I'm going to have to recompile/reinstall my nvidia drivers, and possibly alsa and lirc, but I believe following the procedures for those here should work well following the kernel upgrade. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

Are there any other pitfalls I'm not thinking about? Also, could someone please point me in the right direction as to the procedure? Which PPAs should I enable? Can I just "apt-get dist-upgrade" (or maybe "do-release-upgrade" ?)once the proper ppas are enabled? Will this upgrade my base system all the way to Ubuntu Natty (11.04)?

Thanks in advance

[theminor]

No replies yet, so I'll post my progress attempts so far. First I backed up my system drive to an image. do-release-upgrade did not work (even after editing /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades and setting Prompt=normal). dependency repositories were not enabled, so I just decided to try upgrading the kernel rather than the full distribution.

I'll probably try just installing a later kernel this evening and see if I can get it to work. In the meantime, any advice would be appreciated (procedure, expectations, etc.)!

[Saner]

When I first updated and built my own kernel I used this thread -

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=311158


It always seemed to work fine (unless I borked something) and kept it pretty simple.

As long as you do it via that guide you should keep the older kernel in the grub menu, so if it all goes tits up you can still boot etc..


Its a fun experience, and something that (IMO) its good to know how too do, especially when you are in your situation with hardware.

[theminor]

Fantastic link, thanks! Answers a lot of my questions - I'll give it a shot tonight and see what happens. Thanks again

[theminor]

I just wanted to update this thread with the hopes that it will help someone. I managed to get kernel 3.0 installed and running perfectly using the guide linked above by Saner. That is a great guide. TRIM support is now working great on my SSD! If you are wondering if it is working on your own system, here is an easy way to test it (base XBMC Live Dharma kernel does not support TRIM because it wasn't added until kernel 2.6.33).

The biggest snag I ran into after updating the kernel was (unsurprisingly) updating my nvidia drivers. Running the nvidia installer kept giving me an error saying the downloaded module did not match the old driver version I had with my previous kernel. I had to manually purge all old nvidia modules ("ko" files) before it would install correctly. But once those modules were removed, it worked great.

Thanks again