I think I may finally be ready to throw in the towel on Linux. Everything
is gone, and I wasn't even doing a damn thing other than browsing with
Netscape. One 2nd everything was great, then for no apparent reason the
browser went blank - nothing but a white screen - and it wouldn't close. So
I went to use the Kill tool on it, but I couldn't because all the desktop
icons had disappeared, leaving only black outlines of where they would
normally be. I still wasn't overly concerned because this happens from time
to time anyway. I tried to shutdown, but the shutdown message just came up
and froze, along with everything else except the mouse. So I manually
rebooted. The "not cleanly unmounted" errors came up, as they have been
every time for the past couple months - it usually seems to just delay the
boot process slightly. But then something different popped up:
"/dev/hda5 contains a file system with errors, check forced. /dev/hda5:
inode 43199 has illegal block(s)" and then:
"/dev/hda5: Unexpected Inconsistency: run fsck manually (without -a or -p
options)". Then in red, it says "[FAILED]", followed by: "An error occurred
during the file system check dropping you to a shell. The system will
reboot when you leave the shell. Give root password for maintenance or
ctrl-D for normal startup". So I entered the root password, and it said,
"BASH: ID: command not found". It repeated that bash message for about 5 or
6 lines. I tried the fsck, and then it said: "Parallelizing fsck version
1.14...".
I manually rebooted again, got the same results. Another time I tried the
ctrl-D but it just rebooted back into the same thing. When it rebooted I
saw something about "..cannot unlink..." and "..var/unlock file.." but it
scrolled too fast to make out the whole message.
It took a lot of time and effort over several months to get things to
finally work right, and I still had work left to do. I had previously
experimented with Slackware, which took forever just to get the basics
setup, but then a couple of unexpected severe crashes requiring
reinstallation finally sent me back out in search of something better.
Mandrake seemed to be it, but this latest disaster has me pretty bummed
with the whole thing. It seems like, although Linux may not crash everytime
you turn around, the way Windows does, eventually it is going to crash, and
crash HARD, and not necessarily for any obvious good reason. It's after 1
AM and I've been struggling with this for several hours, so maybe I'll feel
different tomorrow and do another reinstall if I have to. But right now I'm
thinking maybe I might just look for some other OS, maybe FreeBSD or
something. Don't get me wrong - Mandrake has been great, and it's
definitely the best distribution of the 3 I've tried, but it just seems
like there's some inherent unstableness of a different kind lurking in
Linux in general. Maybe I've just been having a string of bad luck. I may
still be a 'newbie' but this one came completely out of left field. The
worst part of it - I was just about ready to start spending most of my time
in Linux. I had just downloaded (not installed) a program that could do
what one of my primary windows programs does, and I had just downloaded
VMware (also not installed yet). But now here I am back in Windows full
time it looks like. I can almost hear Bill laughing :-(
