It all started when I wanted to try out the latest beta of KDE 2.1. Why?
Mainly because my own library was utilized in its implementation of
Solitaire suite (kpat). I downloaded the RPMs, but then I relized I needed
Mandrake 7.2 to install them, while I only had 7.1 at home. So, I decided
to upgrade.
Downloading the image of the installation CD was a breeze because I have
an ADSL connection and iglu.org.il has a mirror of it in Israel. I burned
the CD using my CD-burner, and checked that all the files on it were
present. They were.
I tried to upgrade and eventually managed to do so, while using the Custom
mode. My system seemed to have run OK, but then I tried to do too many
things at once (one of them was mounting a CD ISO on a loop partition, and
the other was running Apache and getting a CGI script, and of course X and
KDE were running), so my machine got stuck and I had to reboot. I think
that's what created the bad sectors.
In any case, when I logged in again, I realized several packages had
several versions installed. Maybe I did not do the upgrade properly or
something like that, but I didn't like it all. I decided the best solution
for the problem was to re-install a clean system.
I tried re-installing over the existing partition while not formatting it,
but it took too much time and eventually got stuck. Luckily, I have one
partition dedicated for /home, so formatting the root did not cause me to
lose too many important files. I decided to format the root partition, and
install a clean system on it.
This seemed to work, however I noticed that I sometimes gets shrieks from
my hard-disk - for instance when I run PySol. I spent an entire day trying
to analyze that, and I finally managed to have a very small Tcl/Tk script
(BTW, I don't like Tcl) which reproduces the problem. However, I couldn't
exactly which file caused it.
Eventually, I noticed that when I run GNOME and execute a KDE
application, I get this kind of noise only that it stops. After I run "cat
libqt.so | wc -c" I found out this file was problematic. I re-installed
the Qt package (rpm -i --replacepkgs qt-blah-blah.i586.rpm) and managed to
get KDE running without problems.
However, Qt has nothing to do with Tcl/Tk, so I had check further. After
running the following script under /usr:
find . -type f |
(while read T ;
do
echo $T ;
echo ;
cat $T | wc -c ;
done)
I managed to find one or two files that were problematic, one of them was
an X font. I accidently tried to re-install the XFree86 package while X
was running, so I rebooted, copied the package to the hard-disk and
re-installed it from there while in a virtual console.
That solved the problem, and I could get PySol as well as that Tcl/Tk
script to run flawlessly. So, after a full day of trying to solve this
problem and more Linux reboots than I have ever done otherwise, I was
finally content with myself.
The morals of the story are:
1. Mandrake should include a separate distinct path for upgrading a
system, in a similar way to what RedHat has. That will eliminate the
confusion that I felt when trying to upgrade.
2. Mandrake should make sure that when upgrading, they don't keep the old
copy of the old package.
3. To find defect files the script above is your friend. However, I do
suggest that you pipe the output of "find . -type f" to a file first.
4. Never do too many things at once that your machine can't handle.
5. The ReiserFS people should provide a sector checking and marking
utility for ReiserFS.
Cheers and happy and flawless hacking,
Shlomi Fish
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The prefix "God Said" has the extraordinary logical property of
converting any statement that follows it into a true one.
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