Software Update 2: Electric Boogaloo!
Feb. 1st, 2010 09:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sinanjuOr, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Hate My Operating System
It appears that I spoke prematurely last night. The seemingly successful update from OpenSUSE 10.3 to OpenSUSE 11.2--emphasis on "seemingly"--went belly up today.
From the beginning it was a little buggy. It always booted into text mode instead of the graphical X Windows system. Not a huge problem, because I could then launch the GUI, but mildly annoying. Also, some odd user password issues. Again, nothing huge, but an annoyance.
I asked about these issues on the OpenSUSE forums today, and was told that I had "borked" my system during the install. These things were merely artifacts of more serious underlying problems. A diagnosis I confirmed for myself when I ran the "repair installation" option from the installation DVD. It found several serious problems and was unable to correct a couple of them.
So reinstalled 11.2. And it wouldn't work at all. Not even as well as it did previously. (I installed in text only mode last night, and I suspect that I may have selected some incorrect settings while fumbling through the text install screens--they looked like blocky, multi-colored old-style DOS screens.)
Feeling a little desperate now, I tried to install 11.1 from an older installation DVD I had lying around. It seemed to install okay--no hiccups, no error messages, no frozen screens. But whenever it should have launched the GUI, I got a dark screen...but with a perfectly responsive mouse pointer. Weird.
Just to be sure the initial problem wasn't due to a bad installation disk (I've had that problem in the past), I ran an MD5 checksum of the installation DVD I'd burned. No, it came out okay. The installation file was not the culprit.
I ran the 11.0 LiveCD and got that working, as I'd done before. It didn't help, but it proved that my system was fundamentally sound--just having...issues with the software.
Now that I knew the 11.2 installation disk was okay, and with nothing else left to try, I popped it into the DVD drive and started a fresh installation. And then I walked away. I watched House with my lovely and talented wife. (Okay, I popped in occasionally to check up on the system.)
And lo and behold, it appears (I say appears--I won't be confident of that for a day or two this time) to have installed without a hitch and to be working just fine now. No mysterious booting to runlevel 3 (text)...so far. No screen blackouts...so far. No frozen screens...so far. So far, so good.
Further announcements as events warrant.
It appears that I spoke prematurely last night. The seemingly successful update from OpenSUSE 10.3 to OpenSUSE 11.2--emphasis on "seemingly"--went belly up today.
From the beginning it was a little buggy. It always booted into text mode instead of the graphical X Windows system. Not a huge problem, because I could then launch the GUI, but mildly annoying. Also, some odd user password issues. Again, nothing huge, but an annoyance.
I asked about these issues on the OpenSUSE forums today, and was told that I had "borked" my system during the install. These things were merely artifacts of more serious underlying problems. A diagnosis I confirmed for myself when I ran the "repair installation" option from the installation DVD. It found several serious problems and was unable to correct a couple of them.
So reinstalled 11.2. And it wouldn't work at all. Not even as well as it did previously. (I installed in text only mode last night, and I suspect that I may have selected some incorrect settings while fumbling through the text install screens--they looked like blocky, multi-colored old-style DOS screens.)
Feeling a little desperate now, I tried to install 11.1 from an older installation DVD I had lying around. It seemed to install okay--no hiccups, no error messages, no frozen screens. But whenever it should have launched the GUI, I got a dark screen...but with a perfectly responsive mouse pointer. Weird.
Just to be sure the initial problem wasn't due to a bad installation disk (I've had that problem in the past), I ran an MD5 checksum of the installation DVD I'd burned. No, it came out okay. The installation file was not the culprit.
I ran the 11.0 LiveCD and got that working, as I'd done before. It didn't help, but it proved that my system was fundamentally sound--just having...issues with the software.
Now that I knew the 11.2 installation disk was okay, and with nothing else left to try, I popped it into the DVD drive and started a fresh installation. And then I walked away. I watched House with my lovely and talented wife. (Okay, I popped in occasionally to check up on the system.)
And lo and behold, it appears (I say appears--I won't be confident of that for a day or two this time) to have installed without a hitch and to be working just fine now. No mysterious booting to runlevel 3 (text)...so far. No screen blackouts...so far. No frozen screens...so far. So far, so good.
Further announcements as events warrant.