Oops, ya broke it
takes on a whole new meaning today.
So, I'm going to keep this short, because I'm still exhausted. First, on Thursday I had another long day of classes... Getting my "diversity collage" and the three page paper for that done was taxing, and ended up being one of those late into the night things - but, at least I got it done.
My MCSE class was also pretty bad, first, during the two hour break between the two classes, I had to spend my time researching what exactly the system state is... Because I forgot to do that the night before. That wasn't horrible, but it added to my already-starting-to-be-stressful day. A quick lunch with a lot of coffee, and then it was off to MCSE415 - Security. A dry topic. My instructor lectured over three chapters, which is right around 200 to 250 pages worth of material. We didn't really have time to do labs again this week (which would make four weeks without labs) - but we technically did labs... Chapter 1's labs were all "what do you think of this - okay, write that down" labs... And that's what we did.
By the time class got out, it was 9:50 - staying a little later than normal, but that's to be expected with this class. Upon returning to the dorm, I started getting ready to end my day... A small dinner to keep me from getting the munchies in the middle of the night and some nice music to soothe away the pains of the day. Well, I guess I was "soothing" for too long, it was past midnight by the time I got into bed, but I was quite tired and was fast-asleep.
That's when all of a sudden, I heard a noise. It was Andrew getting into bed. I vowed to just keep my eyes closed and go back to sleep. But sleep didn't come. Eventually, I decided that I should look at the clock, it may be 4 or even 5am, and I would have got somewhere right around four hours of sleep. That's when I was astonished to see the clock read: "2:30 am." Quite bad, since I've only have been able to return to sleep once in a situation like this. Unfortunately, Friday morning was no exception to the rule. I really tried my best, but after tossing and turning until 5:30 am, I eventually decided that it was time for breakfast; two and a half hours of sleep would have to do for work today.
I decided that since I wasn't able to get much sleep, I decided that I'd take the morning nice and slow - eat a decent breakfast and then get ready for work. Things didn't go exactly as I had hoped for...
First, I was planning on drowning myself in coffee, but I just couldn't bring myself to drink much of it. I wasn't even able to finish all of my breakfast. Then, I realized that I didn't plan out my work clothes the night before. So, I spent some time getting that all around... Especially since the shirt that I wanted to wear was wrinkled and covered with lint (black dress shirt) - by the time I got that all cleaned up, I was already beginning to become late... Odd, I get up over four hours before I should have to get up, and I end up running late for work.
When I get out of the shower, I start to notice that my memory is going. I literally lost my coffee mug - it was nowhere to be found, not in the kitchen, living room, bedroom - I even checked the bathroom, but it wasn't anywhere. After looking everywhere I could think of twice, I gave up. I needed to hurry if I was going to make it to Support Services by 9 am. I had my hair the way I wanted it, I had my clothes on the way I wanted them to be on... Just one last thing: the ID badge. And there's another thing I couldn't find! I had left my ID in the breast pocket of the shirt that I wore the previous week. It took me a good five minutes, but I was able to eventually figure out which shirt I wore the previous week and found my ID. I walked out into the kitchen to see that I only had five minutes to get to work, so I knew I was going to be late. That's when I noticed the microwave - my coffee was in there, so I quickly drank the last of that and headed out... At least one good thing happened.
I was running down the hall to get to the stairs... I figured that if I kept up a good pace, I'd be able to get to work before the clock tower finished ringing, which it hadn't started yet - it was all a matter of timing though. I ran right onto the landing of the stairs, and suddenly realized that they were wet! The cleaning crew had decided to work in Kurtz hall before Baker hall this morning, and decided to mop the stairs that I was planning on jotting down. Luckily, I didn't slip as I skidded to a stop - the shoes I wear to work have very little traction when it comes to wet surfaces.
It was just moments after I exited the building when the clock tower began to chime for 9am. There was no way I was going to be able to make it down to the library in time, but I sure as hell was going to try. I ran down to the library and was actually just feet from the door when the clock tower stopped chiming. I went in and got right to work. It was going to be quite the long day to work under just a few hours of sleep, but I was going to give it my all.
After work, Pat, Andrew, and I wanted to go out for dinner, but first was a quick stop over to Andrew's and my dorm room, so I could register and start downloading a beta version of VMWare. That's where the hell of Linux started to come into play.
When we got back from dinner, I soon went to bed. I was too tired to think straight and had been up for around 18 hours under just 3 hours of sleep. Bad for the body. When I got up, I attempted to install VM - but, during the configuration, it asked where my kernel source files were located at, since it couldn't find them in the usual directory. Well, I didn't install them when I installed SUSE 9.3 a few months ago, so I decided to install it now.
This is where I found out what a mess my system really was. YaST was running like it usually does, and asked me for the CD that had the installation file on it that it needed. When I inserted the CD, the program didn't recognize it as being inserted. The operating system saw the disc, but YaST didn't.
That's when I checked "Installation Source" in YaST - which said "cd:///;devices=/dev/sr0" sr0!?! sr0 was changed ages ago to hda! It doesn't even see the CD drive because it's looking at a different mount point. But no matter how many times I tried to edit it, or add a second source location, it wouldn't let me. So I decided to try something stupid... Delete the entry and create a new one. Each time, the same error would pop up: unable to access protocol 'cd:///' - so, now I've got a SUSE 9.3 system with no installation media able to attach to it, many different applications and services broken because of the change from /dev/sr0 to /dev/hda, and a stack of recently downloaded SUSE 10.0 cds just laying around.
What do you think I did? YUP, installed SUSE 10 on my main system without ever testing it. Now, I had used SUSE 10.0 RC1 before, which sucked, but I needed to get my system up and running correctly again, and doing a fresh install was going to be the best way to do that.
Unfortunately, there was some problems with the installer. First, my attempt at upgrading the system yielded some broken packages during the installer, so I had to abort. I decided to try again - this time doing a clean install (formatting the necessary partitions and installing SUSE 10 with no previous operating system installed) - which seems to have worked.
I've had a few problems though - which are causing me to think that SUSE 10 may have been a bad idea. My most notable is the fact that I have no audio on the system anymore. I'm getting the same driver issue that I had in SUSE 10.0 RC1 - it just started happening after I did the YOU critical updates. But, I can't tell which one screwed over the sound drivers, of quite some relevance, I didn't have sound before - it's just now that it is accompanied by an error message.
To make this already horrendously long story a little shorter, I believe that I shall install 9.3 again... Maybe one of these days Novell will release a version of SUSE (above 9.3) that will work with my sound card. I'll probably still work with 10 on Experiment 8 here eventually.
Well, I'm quite tired again, and there's much work to be done if I want to get SUSE 9.3 installed before I go to bed, I must be off to work again. --sorry I haven't read the f'list in a few days... It's on my todo list.
So, I'm going to keep this short, because I'm still exhausted. First, on Thursday I had another long day of classes... Getting my "diversity collage" and the three page paper for that done was taxing, and ended up being one of those late into the night things - but, at least I got it done.
My MCSE class was also pretty bad, first, during the two hour break between the two classes, I had to spend my time researching what exactly the system state is... Because I forgot to do that the night before. That wasn't horrible, but it added to my already-starting-to-be-stressful day. A quick lunch with a lot of coffee, and then it was off to MCSE415 - Security. A dry topic. My instructor lectured over three chapters, which is right around 200 to 250 pages worth of material. We didn't really have time to do labs again this week (which would make four weeks without labs) - but we technically did labs... Chapter 1's labs were all "what do you think of this - okay, write that down" labs... And that's what we did.
By the time class got out, it was 9:50 - staying a little later than normal, but that's to be expected with this class. Upon returning to the dorm, I started getting ready to end my day... A small dinner to keep me from getting the munchies in the middle of the night and some nice music to soothe away the pains of the day. Well, I guess I was "soothing" for too long, it was past midnight by the time I got into bed, but I was quite tired and was fast-asleep.
That's when all of a sudden, I heard a noise. It was Andrew getting into bed. I vowed to just keep my eyes closed and go back to sleep. But sleep didn't come. Eventually, I decided that I should look at the clock, it may be 4 or even 5am, and I would have got somewhere right around four hours of sleep. That's when I was astonished to see the clock read: "2:30 am." Quite bad, since I've only have been able to return to sleep once in a situation like this. Unfortunately, Friday morning was no exception to the rule. I really tried my best, but after tossing and turning until 5:30 am, I eventually decided that it was time for breakfast; two and a half hours of sleep would have to do for work today.
I decided that since I wasn't able to get much sleep, I decided that I'd take the morning nice and slow - eat a decent breakfast and then get ready for work. Things didn't go exactly as I had hoped for...
First, I was planning on drowning myself in coffee, but I just couldn't bring myself to drink much of it. I wasn't even able to finish all of my breakfast. Then, I realized that I didn't plan out my work clothes the night before. So, I spent some time getting that all around... Especially since the shirt that I wanted to wear was wrinkled and covered with lint (black dress shirt) - by the time I got that all cleaned up, I was already beginning to become late... Odd, I get up over four hours before I should have to get up, and I end up running late for work.
When I get out of the shower, I start to notice that my memory is going. I literally lost my coffee mug - it was nowhere to be found, not in the kitchen, living room, bedroom - I even checked the bathroom, but it wasn't anywhere. After looking everywhere I could think of twice, I gave up. I needed to hurry if I was going to make it to Support Services by 9 am. I had my hair the way I wanted it, I had my clothes on the way I wanted them to be on... Just one last thing: the ID badge. And there's another thing I couldn't find! I had left my ID in the breast pocket of the shirt that I wore the previous week. It took me a good five minutes, but I was able to eventually figure out which shirt I wore the previous week and found my ID. I walked out into the kitchen to see that I only had five minutes to get to work, so I knew I was going to be late. That's when I noticed the microwave - my coffee was in there, so I quickly drank the last of that and headed out... At least one good thing happened.
I was running down the hall to get to the stairs... I figured that if I kept up a good pace, I'd be able to get to work before the clock tower finished ringing, which it hadn't started yet - it was all a matter of timing though. I ran right onto the landing of the stairs, and suddenly realized that they were wet! The cleaning crew had decided to work in Kurtz hall before Baker hall this morning, and decided to mop the stairs that I was planning on jotting down. Luckily, I didn't slip as I skidded to a stop - the shoes I wear to work have very little traction when it comes to wet surfaces.
It was just moments after I exited the building when the clock tower began to chime for 9am. There was no way I was going to be able to make it down to the library in time, but I sure as hell was going to try. I ran down to the library and was actually just feet from the door when the clock tower stopped chiming. I went in and got right to work. It was going to be quite the long day to work under just a few hours of sleep, but I was going to give it my all.
After work, Pat, Andrew, and I wanted to go out for dinner, but first was a quick stop over to Andrew's and my dorm room, so I could register and start downloading a beta version of VMWare. That's where the hell of Linux started to come into play.
When we got back from dinner, I soon went to bed. I was too tired to think straight and had been up for around 18 hours under just 3 hours of sleep. Bad for the body. When I got up, I attempted to install VM - but, during the configuration, it asked where my kernel source files were located at, since it couldn't find them in the usual directory. Well, I didn't install them when I installed SUSE 9.3 a few months ago, so I decided to install it now.
This is where I found out what a mess my system really was. YaST was running like it usually does, and asked me for the CD that had the installation file on it that it needed. When I inserted the CD, the program didn't recognize it as being inserted. The operating system saw the disc, but YaST didn't.
That's when I checked "Installation Source" in YaST - which said "cd:///;devices=/dev/sr0" sr0!?! sr0 was changed ages ago to hda! It doesn't even see the CD drive because it's looking at a different mount point. But no matter how many times I tried to edit it, or add a second source location, it wouldn't let me. So I decided to try something stupid... Delete the entry and create a new one. Each time, the same error would pop up: unable to access protocol 'cd:///' - so, now I've got a SUSE 9.3 system with no installation media able to attach to it, many different applications and services broken because of the change from /dev/sr0 to /dev/hda, and a stack of recently downloaded SUSE 10.0 cds just laying around.
What do you think I did? YUP, installed SUSE 10 on my main system without ever testing it. Now, I had used SUSE 10.0 RC1 before, which sucked, but I needed to get my system up and running correctly again, and doing a fresh install was going to be the best way to do that.
Unfortunately, there was some problems with the installer. First, my attempt at upgrading the system yielded some broken packages during the installer, so I had to abort. I decided to try again - this time doing a clean install (formatting the necessary partitions and installing SUSE 10 with no previous operating system installed) - which seems to have worked.
I've had a few problems though - which are causing me to think that SUSE 10 may have been a bad idea. My most notable is the fact that I have no audio on the system anymore. I'm getting the same driver issue that I had in SUSE 10.0 RC1 - it just started happening after I did the YOU critical updates. But, I can't tell which one screwed over the sound drivers, of quite some relevance, I didn't have sound before - it's just now that it is accompanied by an error message.
To make this already horrendously long story a little shorter, I believe that I shall install 9.3 again... Maybe one of these days Novell will release a version of SUSE (above 9.3) that will work with my sound card. I'll probably still work with 10 on Experiment 8 here eventually.
Well, I'm quite tired again, and there's much work to be done if I want to get SUSE 9.3 installed before I go to bed, I must be off to work again. --sorry I haven't read the f'list in a few days... It's on my todo list.