Don't kill me for this post - I did put OT in the subject line. I just had to share it, because I really thought it had something to do with either cooker or the MandrakeClub website.
Why the Club website? Because that's what I was looking at when my box locked up. Why cooker? Because I run full cooker (yes, I know the risks). But I hadn't had a problem this bad in a while. No X at all. I could boot to console mode (thank goodness I shun the bootsplash mode, I like to see the text roll by - so when it said "hit i for interactive startup," that's what I did). I let everything start except dm and all was well. My samba clients could still access my OpenOffice files, so that was OK (gotta keep track of my weight, my meds, daily high and low outdoor temperatures, bicycle statistics, work hours, budget, etc.). The .xsession-errors file said things like: kdecore (KLibLoader): WARNING: KLibrary: /usr/lib/libkdecore.so.4: undefined symbol: NP_GetValue nspluginscan: WARNING: Plugin doesn't implement NP_GetValue and "Display not found". Tried reinstalling the NVIDIA drivers. No luck. Kept up on my urpmi updates. No good. Every time I tried to get into X (startx, /etc/init.d/dm) the monitor would shut off! This went on for two days. Finally today, thinking maybe it was the video card, I tried booting my (miniscule) Win98 partition. It wouldn't come up either. All I could get on the nVidia card was console mode - no graphics, either Linux or Win*. So I pulled the nVidia card and dropped in an old Diamond Stealth III S540 32MB card. Voila! Up and running. What happened? I'm thinking heat damage. Don't ask me why, but for some idiotic reason I put the nVidia card (which has a heatsink and fan on the video chip) between two other cards. What was I thinking? It wasn't getting any air, and everybody knows that a Linux box runs 24/7. I probably fried the high-end graphics portion of the chip. Just glad to be back ... now I just have to weed through the 1327 emails I've received in the last 56 hours ... End of OT treatise ... Jay
