.comment: Brain-Munching Insects and SuSE 7.3

By: Dennis E. Powell
Wednesday, October 31, 2001 02:28:56 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/3874/1/

Two Headaches

I should say at the outset that I am crankier than usual this week. Every three or four years, I have a bout with something called "cluster headaches," a malady straight out of Hitchcock. These headaches work like this: I'm awakened in the middle of the night, same time every night, by a headache that is absolutely excruciating -- the literature warns that sufferers must be separated from firearms, lest they decide to end their headaches themselves. It feels as if particularly voracious insects are gnawing at my skull, behind my right eye, or perhaps a dental drill is doing the work. Both light and sound are intolerable. Then, usually after a couple of hours, the headache goes away and I'm free to go back to bed.

One gets cranky when sleep becomes one's enemy, as it has here in the last week. (I'm off, soon as I'm done with this, to the doctor; it is said that injections of something called Sumitriptan brings relief in 5 to 10 minutes, meaning that when awakened in agony I'll get to give myself a shot. Oh, joy.)

It was within this fatigued milieu that I received a review copy of SuSE 7.3 late last week. I have not had a chance to review it in full yet -- I want to put it through a clean install and an install onto a notebook machine first -- but I have used its "update" function on my production machine. I shall herein detail my experiences. For those of you who do not have time to read on, let me summarize: It damn near destroyed my machine, and I'm by no means certain that it won't complete the job even yet.

There's a good chance that when installed from scratch on a perfectly clear drive, SuSE 7.3 is as wonderful as SuSE's distributions tend to be. As I mentioned, I'll find out and pass the word along. But the "update" install, or at least one of the configurations therein, is not just unacceptable, it's very much to be avoided. Here, it actually corrupted data in my home directory.

SuSE Linux Professional 7.3 comprises a folder containing 7 CDs and a DVD, plus four manuals (Configuration, Network, Applications, and Reference Manual as well as a quick-start guide) and boot and kernel modules floppies.

Having installed SuSE both from CD and ftp perhaps a dozen times in earlier versions, I've come to learn that the "update" install is reliable, and that unless one doesn't mind going through and removing all sorts of things that one doesn't want, the choice is to upgrade only the packages currently installed on the system. It's a lot easier to add other things later than it is to pick through the installed package list uninstalling stuff that SuSE thought erroneously that you want.

I looked forward to this upgrade for a few reasons, XFree86-4.1 and the opportunity to drop the Ext3 journaling file system atop my existing partitions among them. Ext3's chief advantage, in my estimation, is that it does not require a reformat of the partition. Using the upgrade path, though, I found no place where Ext3 could be invoked. Indeed, the only place I did find it was in the menu for new installations, at the point where partitions are formatted. I don't think SuSE wants those of us who upgrade to use Ext3.

Even so, things went along pretty well until it got to the point where it proposed to reboot the machine. The screen went blank -- not text-mode console blank, but very dark, as if XFree86 were not quite letting go. I waited 45 minutes for something to happen. Nothing did. I tried a reboot from the keyboard, but the keyboard was apparently blocked. So I had to power down and then back up again, stopping at the BIOS to tell the machine to boot now from the hard drive instead of the CD reader. In due course, I was back in the install routine, and was asked to feed in CDs 2, 3, 4, and 5 in turn. After awhile I was told that the "update" had been successful.

Upon reboot, I saw that Linux-2.4.7 was booting instead of the 2.4.10 that ships with the new SuSE. I fired up Pico, edited /etc/lilo.conf to boot the new kernel (all the while wondering why the "update" routine hadn't) and ran /sbin/lilo, then rebooted again into the new kernel.

At "startx" (I have no truck with graphical logins, thanks), I saw that SuSE's KDE-2.2 had done little violence to my desktop configuration. But anti-aliased typefaces looked just awful -- much worse than they had when I was running 7.2 just a couple of hours before.

When one is happy with one's KDE, as I had been, one keeps a backup of both KDE and Qt, to use in replacing the ones foisted off by a distribution that thinks it know what you want better than you do. (The SuSE KDE is perfect for newbies.) Planning to switch back, I did an orderly shutdown of KDE, expecting a command prompt. My expectations, though, were dashed by that blank graphical screen once again, and the corresponding keyboard block. Time again for the Big Red Button.

It Gets Worse

An unclean shutdown, of course, brings us our old friend e2fsck when one has not had access to Ext3. Though my 20-meg drive is small by current standards, it takes awhile. As it started, I noticed an error -- "Spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7" -- which I pondered until I saw that e2fsck wanted to be run manually on hda4, the residence of my home directory.

E2fsck was not kind to my home directory. When the smoke had cleared, it had moved a total of 475 megs of stuff, in two files, to lost+found. When it was all over and I was at a prompt, I SUed root and restored my backed up KDE and Qt. KDE started uneventfully, this time with my configuration entirely intact. Anti-aliasing was still but a dim and crippled shadow of its former self.

And when I opened KMail, I was singularly undelighted to discover that my Inbox, which contained about 1,500 messages, had disappeared. I have not yet discovered what else found its way into the 475 megs of stuff uselessly dumped into lost+found (the sheer size of which makes it all but impossible to sort out, too).

To top it all off, KDE shuts down just fine but something prevents my getting to a prompt -- and that same something keeps keyboard input from being heard by the machine -- meaning that I am at the mercy of uptime unless I want to give this bright and shiny new distribution another bite at my ~/. This is, um, unacceptable. No, it flat-out sucks.

I've looked at the SuSE users mailing list and I find, now, numerous reports of failed "updates." Some have argued that one should never do an "update." To which I have a question -- why the hell include it if it doesn't work, if you're not supposed to use it? It is like putting a spigot that dispenses bourbon in the middle of the steering wheel and then presuming that the driver will figure out that there will be bad results if he uses it. No, actually, it's worse -- it's possible to learn independent of a particular automobile that drunken driving is often fatal.

But in any event, it does not matter whether or not SuSE 7.3 is the greatest thing in the world if it destroys my data. I appreciate the perceived need for distributions to be as Microsoft-like as possible, but this is a little too close.

SuSE is a generally good distributor. I like and use its products and think that it's important that SuSE stay in business if for no other reason than to compete against the Red Hat hegemon. That having been said, I've never had a more disastrous experience in installing any operating system than the one I had with "updating" to 7.3. This time yesterday, my 7.2 install worked perfectly or as close to it as makes no difference. Now I have a machine that cannot be said to work properly at all. Which means that I'll have to take a day and burn eight or nine CDs of what's left of my home directory, plus such configuration files as I'd just as soon not reconstruct, then wipe the whole thing and reinstall. I'll give 7.3 another shot, rather than going straight back to 7.2 -- but the fact that it's an issue at all is troubling. And you can bet I'll put it on the lab rat and give it a good hammering before I give it a second chance on the production machine. (And, as I said, I'll tell you how it works out.)

There is some good news. Halfway through writing this, I paused to visit the physician, who informed me that sumitriptan is available as a nasal spray -- no needles necessary. So far, though, there's no such easy cure for the other headache.