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. 😀
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!
Err, I forgot to mention; I also need to install the NVidia drivers for my video card and possibly for my mobo.