System Crash (again)

It turns out that installing the ATI drivers on my Fedora 10 box was a huge mistake. Things seemed to work, but when the screen saver locked the desktop, it never came back. Even after removing the driver and trying to set things back under X, it was still broken. Now, I know that X problems like this are just chronic. Once they start things just get worse. There is no fixing things.

So, I reformatted the drive and started over again.

You know, Fedora is really starting to remind me of Windows 95. One thing goes wrong and the only way to get back to a stable system is to reinstall the OS. Yup, Windows.

I did something different this time. I didn't bother backing anything up. There was ample opportunity. I didn't save any of my podcast settings. didn't save any blog stuff, or documents. I have that information in Google Docs. The only thing I really just didn't bother with was the one video I shot of the racers. It is gone. I just don't care enough to hang on to it.

If I had a Ubuntu DVD on hand, I would have loaded it. it would have been the last straw for Fedora for the time being. I'm just that fed up with it.

Another symptom was a lost of synchronization for terminals. That is, I couldn't get to the terminal by hitting ctrl-alt-f1 or any other function key. What would have fixed this was hooking up the analogue monitor cable. I believe that is what was going on. The ATI driver was giving up the digital connection when heading for the tty connections.

Fedora 10 doesn't come up to the screen that lets you select which kernel you want. This prevents you from booting to single user without booting from the Fedora 10 CD, select the recovery option, let the nearly useless console load up and manually edit the grub.conf file for this end.

I would love to use Knoppix for editing the grub file, but Knoppix does not mount the virtual disk file system what ever the hell Fedora calls it. you have to jump through even more loops to get that to work. I'm telling you Shit is falling apart around my ears. Did I already mention Windows 95?

I dread the Linux registry. Coming to a box near me any day. AAAAAAAAAA!!!!!

At work I fixed a problem with Java running in Firefox on Red Hat Enterprise 5.2. The trouble is one of the components of Java no longer works in Firefox with version 3.0. We use that bit so I played with a couple of programs that let you use old plugins with new browsers. That didn't work. I then tried to use the 32 bit version of Firefox on a 64 bit system. That worked, but now plugin. I ended up just instilling an old version of Firefox 2.0 on the system in a local folder and pointing that to the old plugin. That worked, but kind of sucks. They are working on updating the mechanism.

At work, I also fought a stupid situation for over an hour on a couple machines. The situation was trying to mount a device through the old serial port from a server. I messed with it and messed with it. I used a null modem. I used a serial cable. Nothing let me connect. Then I tried a completely different kind of server across the rack. That worked. It turns out the serial ports are all crazy on the servers on that rack. They are configured as port 24 or something instead of 1 or 2. Still, managed to get attached, but it ended up taking far too long. I felt like an idiot.

At work, I swapped out hardware in a couple of 2003 servers and installed the OS. Every driver is trying to bite me in the ass. Every time Windows can make a wrong turn, it does just to get at me. I'll get them up tomorrow, with all the hardware they need. Or else.