opkg update broke kernel / booting

[Russell Sears]

I did an opkg update today.  The new kernel package erased the old 
kernel, but the copy to flash must have failed.  uBoot said "wrong image 
format for bootm command", and failed to load the kernel.

I had to use my laptop rebuild a uImage from the ipk file.  Once I got 
the phone to boot, doing a "opkg --force-reinstall install kernel-image" 
failed with "error 2"

Am I the only one seeing this?  Any idea why I'm getting that error?

-Rusty

ps: In case I'm not the only one this bug bit, here's how to fix the 
phone without losing the contents of "/".

I used compiled versions of utilities already present in my MokoMakefile 
tree, and built dfu-util from svn.  I used dpkg that was already on my 
laptop, since I'm running ubunutu.  I did the following (though you'd 
need to read:

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/U-boot
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Flashing_Openmoko

to reproduce the fix from what I have here...).  Most commands don't fit 
on one line; blank lines separate commands.

mv 
kernel-vmlinux_2.6.24+git25+8533927964761f4e2078ccd8607b90f5acc60b93-r0_om-gta02.deb
kernel-vmlinux_2.6.24+git25+8533927964761f4e2078ccd8607b90f5acc60b93-r0_om-gta02.ipk

dpkg -X 
kernel-vmlinux_2.6.24+git25+8533927964761f4e2078ccd8607b90f5acc60b93-r0_om-gta02.deb 
  .

cd boot

arm-angstrom-linux-gnueabi-objcopy -O binary -R .note -R .comment -S 
vmlinux-2.6.24 linux.bin

gzip -9 linux.bin

moko/build/tmp/staging/x86_64-linux/usr/bin/uboot-mkimage -A arm -O 
linux -T kernel -C gzip -a 30008000 -e 30008000 -n "Kernel Image QT2410" 
-d linux.bin.gz uImage

dfu-util -a kernel -R -D uImage