CoffeeBear.net

Yesterday

Posted by Mark | Filed under Computers, Life, Site News

Bah, I’m still a bit torked off about yes­ter­day. At work¹, there’s been a per­son who keeps send­ing up emails with the wrong code in the sub­ject line. We use these codes to route the issues to the cor­rect per­son and putting the wrong code on the email can mean a delay of at least a week before the issue gets looked at. Well, this same idjit² sent an email ask­ing for an update on one of those issues. Since I was run­ning a process at the time; I looked over the issue, found it was mis­lableled, for­warded it over to the cor­rect per­son and then spent prob­a­bly 2 hours writ­ing up a diplo­matic response explain­ing the dif­fer­ence between two of the codes we use.

For a while, the idjit was silent but even­tu­ally they sent back an email that was child­ish & emo­tional. I responded apol­o­giz­ing for the hurt feel­ings and reit­er­ated my point about using the proper codes. Then the idjit replied back appar­ently look­ing for some way to proove that I was wrong about the idjit’s use of the email code. When I trounced the idjit’s counter argu­ment; they sent back a reply with noth­ing more than a rep­e­ti­tion of the keys points of the orig­i­nal email and a note that none of this dis­cus­sion was help­ing the cus­tomer. I prob­a­bly just sat and stared at that for 15 min­utes and then spent the next 45 min­utes try­ing to think of a polite response. Even­tu­ally, I gave up and for­warded it to the other per­son who has to deal with these issues to see if she could think of one. So far none has been forth com­ing and I really want to reply to that email with: “You’re absolutely right. None of this is help­ing the cus­tomer. And you know what else? If you’d sent this up cor­rectly; then the customer’s issue would be one entire week closer to being fixed.” Alas, I don’t think I have it in me to be that cruel, even to an idjit. I came pretty darn close to send­ing that sort of nasty-gram though as by the end of the day my sinuses were throb­bing with the worst sinus hea­cache that I’ve had in quite some time. I got home and took a bit of Advil Cold & Sinus³. Shortly there­after, I was feel­ing bet­ter and then Ariesna made me tomato soup with grilled cheese sand­wiches. I washed din­ner down with large glasses of orange juice and was feel­ing pretty alright. So I decided to go ahead with my plans for the evening.

Mind you, those plans were noth­ing excit­ing. Well, kind of excit­ing to me but bor­ing as all get out to my two faith­ful read­ers. I’ve been a long time Linux user and for quite a while now; I’ve been run­ning SuSE Linux 9.0 Pro. I’ve been happy with it, par­tic­u­larly since I’d dis­cov­ered APT and tricked it out a bit beyond the basic install. How­ever, since I’d bought my copy SuSE had released 9.1 and then 9.2. 9.2 runs on the 2.6.x series of Linux ker­nels and that’s some­thing I’d been want­ing to play around⁴. So I’ve been burn­ing my most valu­able data to disc and mov­ing other files to my server; so I wouldn’t lose any data dur­ing the new install.

Yes, I did say new install. In part, I choose to do a a com­plete wipe because I have psy­cho­log­i­cal scar­ing left from my usage of M$ Win­dows and in part because I’d par­tially bro­ken some­thing⁵, some­where in KDE and I wanted to make sure that issue was killed with this new ver­sion. Once I was sure every­thing was backed up; I popped the new install disc in and rebooted.

Oh, I should prob­a­bly men­tion that the install disc was a burned copy of the DVD iso; which SuSE released ear­lier this month. It doesn’t have every­thing on it that the pur­chased ver­sion does (mostly miss­ing development/server stuff ) but it’s enough to install it and many of the pack­ages with­out resort­ing to down­load­ing pack­ages via ftp.

Any­hoo, the installer popped up and I got right into it. Unfor­tu­nately, the default new install was try­ing to par­ti­tion my hard drive wrong. I’ve got mul­ti­ple dri­ves in my com­puter attached to dif­fer­ent con­trollers and then each drive is par­ti­tioned to seper­ate out dif­fer­ent things. I.e.
/dev/hda1 is my WinXP install (I likes my Half-Life2 too much to give this up).
/dev/hda2 held my SuSE 9.0’s root mount point
/dev/hda3 was my old /home
/dev/hda4 was the old swap
/dev/hdc is my CD burner/DVD reader
/dev/hdd is my DVD burner

Note for the non-techies: /dev/hda means the first hard drive on the first IDE con­troller in the sys­tem. /dev/hda# indi­cates a spe­cific par­ti­tion on that drive.

There’s one other drive in my sys­tem con­nected to a RAID con­troller on my mobo but none of my Linux installs has been able to see it. Though I heard from a friend that Alan Cox has a patch for the 2.6.x ker­nel to add sup­port for it. I use that last drive for all the video games that I play under Win­dows; so I don’t really need to see it under Linux but it would be nice to be able to. Get­ting back to what I was talk­ing about SuSE 9.2’s default par­ti­tion setup would have left rewrote /dev/hda3 as the new / mount point, leav­ing /dev/hda2 umounted (wast­ing that space). So I reset it to reclaim that space for the new Linux install. Then I went through the pack­age selec­tion to make sure all the apps I wanted would be installed. Though because this isn’t the pur­chased ver­sion; I’m still miss­ing some stuff but that’s what APT is for. :D

The actual install ran for about 25–30 min­utes and then I spent the rest of the night copy­ing all my data files back into place and set­ting up my email⁶. I ended up going to bed; leav­ing my com­puter to fin­ish copy­ing all my files back over and I still don’t have every­thing tweaked just so yet, but I’m get­ting close. I still need to setup a cou­ple of apps (i.e. Blue­fish, Bit­Tor­rent, etc…), fig­ure out why SuSE isn’t see­ing my iPod (9.0 detected it w/out a prob­lem) and see if YaST still has a tool for forc­ing my opti­cal dri­ves to use DMA.

¹ This part is going to be some­what vague as I’m pretty sure our new employ­ment agree­ment doesn’t allow me to give specifics and in any case, I’m not inter­ested in being fired over mak­ing a com­ment on this site.
² Like an idiot, only not that bright.
³ No, they’re not a spon­sor (CB.net doesn’t have any spon­sors). This is just the only frickin’ med­i­cine on the mar­ket that does any­thing for my sinus headaches. Every other med­i­cine that has worked for me has been pulled from the mar­ket and replaced with “safer” ver­sion that doesn’t do jack. *grumpf*
⁴ I’d heard it per­forms a bit bet­ter (but there’s more on that later in the post) and I didn’t feel com­fort­able try­ing to com­pile my own ker­nel.
⁵ Every time I was open­ing a new Kon­queror win­dow or a native KDE app or try­ing to open a file from within an app; Kon­queror would pop-up an error about some mime type/octet stream being miss­ing. *shrug*
⁶ A big shout out to the KDE devel­op­ers for mak­ing such a won­der­ful envi­ron­ment. A dou­ble, big shout to the Kon­tact devel­op­ers for mak­ing a great app!

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