everything melts down (it's sunday ...)

By basd on Nov 20, 2011 | In opensuse

I went back to openSUSE Studio to build goliath1 0.0.4. (It would be nice to have network support). Chaos began.

...

Studio would not properly retrieve my settings. I'm not even certain it had retained the 0.0.3 changes, it may have fallen back to somewhere around 0.0.2 or a mix of the above. I checked for the packages I knew I had added (still there), but the size did not seem correct.

Plus, it would not retrieve my repository list and package list, though I could search through packages. Weird.

So ... while I was puzzling about this, my daughter came to me with her computer ... not booting. Fsck errors. Oh, crap.

I thought, well, this might be a good time to upgrade to 12.1. Taking the functional 12.1 (official) KDE USB live install, I booted up.

Oops. The Gateway LT3103u is particularly problematic, video-wise. I had just gotten it working fairly decently last week by installing the AMD/ATI fglrx repositories. Otherwise, the screen has been working/not working/borking depending on the latest OpSu updates. Totally crazy.

Okay, I got the Lunatic Screen of You Can't See Anything.

So, I rebooted to runlevel 3 (just FYI because it took me a long time to figure this out -- you just hit "3" on the options line, which is to say, you just hit "3" when the grub screen comes up) and tried to use zypper t)o install the flgrx repository. But apparently the .repo file is missing at the repo, so zypper refused to install. So, then I ran a zypper in ...fglrx... direct from the repository. Which almost you worked, but again, where you see dots is really a very long url, which means lots of typos between start and finally getting it right. Very frustrating and time consuming, especially as I could not understand why the repo would not install (I have installed it with zypper before following the OpSu FAQ on this, something has changed.)

BUT, FAIL. Because, I had the Live KDE on a 4gb flash drive. Well, the flgrx install, with supporting Xorg files, etc., is AS BIG AS the entire Live KDE, something like 637 mb installed. But then again, there is additional overhead for the downloaded packages, unzipping, etc. So, somewhere at 33% install of the new kernel, the install (and computer) locked up. Which is to say my Live KDE is dead and has to be reinstalled.

Sooo ... but I should have the solution, correct? Are I not building goliath1, which contains fglrx support? Yes, and 0.0.3 not only booted faster than I was expecting, it worked just fine and looked very nice.

But, as mentioned previously, I managed to put this together without network support. YAST showed eth0 on the "network bridge" or some such, the actual ethernet card was unconfigured (but eth2) and the wireless was unconfigured. I configured eth2, but try as I might, I could not get a DHCP response, it would just background. So, I tried to activate wlan0, but no iwtools or whatever installed. Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless.

Finally I rebooted to the broken operating system (with runlevel 3) and it booted to a "repair" prompt. I sensed I had been here before sometime, and things were looking better. There was a prompt that the drive was mounted read only and instructions how to remount r/w, but I wasn't sure whether to do this or not. So, I just ran fsck (which had been failing in automated mode on a regular boot) -- it ran me through a series of prompts regarding orphaned whatevers and the like, informed me the drive was successfully fixed and I rebooted. Problem(s) solved, apparently.

Then back to OpSu Studio. I logged out, shut down my browser and restarted everything and this time Studio was no longer crazy, so I started the 0.0.5 build (I had tried the 0.0.4 build in Studio-broken mode) but it was a fail.

So, now I am waiting to see if I end up with a goliath1 that actually can connect to the network. The build is still running, so it will be a couple of hours before I know that answer.