Since there has been a complaint that this list is too quiet, I figured I might as well moan about that most unreliable of purchases, i.e. hardware!
Earlier this year, I needed more DASD^H^H^H^H disk space, so I bought new disks - that forced me to get a new mobo, the via chipset on the old one didn't understand current SATA (v3?) - at least wikipedia pointed me to the problem. Once I'd got a new mobo, the 3 disks (500Gb '/', 2x1TB RAID-1 for data) were fine - that was in mid March. Since then, the system disk started to fail, so I replaced it. Then, I had some (unrelated) mail errors while I was on holiday, which caused me to login directly once I got home, instead of using ssh : loads of error messages about one of the RAID drives on tty1. Eventually, I replaced the drive [ and boy, I'm glad I only use RAID-1 : I managed to swap the wrong drive, so its resync failed with unreadable errors ] and all is well there - for the moment. Although, my attempt to summarise the smartmontools output is obviously defective, the summary had appeared to show all was well. So, back to my desktops, and the Ctrl key on my keyboard became intermittently sticky. Oddly, I only noticed this while upgrading a kernel on *one* machine, and it took a long while to establish that it was an intermittently faulty keyboard, not a bad kernel. Swapped the keyboard, the x86 desktops seem ok. A couple of days ago (and, I think, after swapping the keyvboard), I finally upgraded the kernel on my ppc64 to 3.0.0. Booted ok and xorg/nouveau seemed ok, but vim (in urxvt) was "difficult" - only the most basic keys worked, no cursor movement from the arrows or PgUp / PgDown, and no ESC although Ctrl-C gave me ESC. Weird. Very Weird. Tonight, I sat down with 'diff' on the configs (nothing likely), and then used a pen and paper to record the values from showkey and xev, for 'good' and 'new' kernels. Bizzarely, they were all identical. I then tried to edit my notes using vim under urxvt, and everything was fine. Summary - Hardware: I hate it. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
