I feel like taking my favorite deity's name in vain so he would smite me off of the face of the earth because I couldn't be madder in hell than I am now at openSuSE's updater program.
I have a raid disk controller that is not directly supported by any kernel issued by openSuSE. Worse, there are kernels that will not compile the source of the controller card so when I get a kernel that will both compile and is compatible with the Rocket Raid Corporation rr174x controller that allows me to have a 2.5TB raid5 hardware array PLUS any software (MD) array(s) I want to define with a total of 9 drives on my system, I don't want things automatically screwed up by anyone or anything. I recently compiled 2.6.22.13-0.3-bigsmp and the driver for my controller assimilated itself nicely and I added the new kernel and modules to the appropriate directories and to GRUB menu.lst and rebooted and everything worked. As did the previous kernels (2 deep) which gives one a warm fuzzy feeling considering that from 10.2 through the 2nd released kernel of 10.3GM, I had to do without my hardware controller and to get stuff off of those drives, I had to physically reinstall a drive with 10.2 on it that allowed the controller to work. Shortly after rebooting, the updater said it had a security patch on the new .13 kernel and (I know, I should know better than to trust anything by now), it was small, a patch and I said, go ahead, it isn't installing a new kernel, just requires a reboot to load it into memory after the update.....Yeah, right!....It not only ate my GRUB configuration files and replaced them, it also destroyed (by erasure) all of the other linux kernels in /boot, their syms AND all of the modules AND sources in /lib for those versions!!!!! Dammitalltohellanyway!!!! It is about dammed time this automatic with no recourse destruction by update of erstwhile functioning systems stops and the updater and Yast updates give us the OPTION to KEEP copies of our current configuration. Somewhere back around 7-9, this was the default, and that was when drive space was expensive....now, there is no excuse to not at least make it an option at a very minimum. Thankfully the kernel did boot and was still functional with my controller or I would have weeks of work ahead of me rather than hours or perhaps days recompiling from source and reinstalling the backup sources and boot images. Get with it openSuSE!!!! If my name was Bill Gates, I'd be spending a few million, maybe billion, on lawyers about now regardless of whether or not 'free software' is exempt from destroying peoples work or not. I am that mad that if I were indeed him, I'd go from richest man in the world to poorest, paying lawyers to induce management at openSuSE once and for all to opt for what is right rather than what is expedient. Richard (a very pissed off dude right now) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
