in which some problems self-cure and others don't

By basd on Dec 8, 2009 | In linux, opensuse

Well, first off, I have completed my morning ritual of removing the scumbag spammer posts from my comments. They never post anyway, but it's a huge waste of time, so I often think about shutting off the comment section altogether (since I've only gotten, what, three? legit. comments in all of eternity.)

...

With any luck, some of the morons behind the spambots will soon consult myself or a colleague in my primary profession. (Hope I overcharge ...)

But, in any event, my OpSu 11.2 upgrade has yielded a few surprises. I earlier mentioned I was hoping to cure some defects that happened in the OpSu 11.1 install. One being, the software package manager always loaded with a failure to parse prompt -- which seemingly survived the upgrade.

Then, for no apparent reason, the prompt changed to one that gave me a bit more info. Suddenly, a repository was "not found." Moreover, it was one that was not in my repository list. Mr. Holmes, we have a clue! So, as it turns out, buried in /var/zypp/repos/services.d (or something to that effect) was a file "services.services." Which referenced the offending repository.

Now, I could not find any info at OpSu that would tell me what this was all about or why I needed it -- but seeing as it did not work, I moved it out of the directory (renaming it to .sav didn't work as it was still read by YAST2). As far as I can tell, problem solved.

I had mentioned the OpSu 11.2 upgrade had inflicted a second problem. My windows mounts weren't working, destablizing my directory architecture in a very unfriendly way. First of all, I discovered I apparently already had this problem in OpSu 11.1, as I had a script file that was umounting and re-mounting the windows partitions anyway. But for whatever reason, the script was not working successfully in OpSu 11.2, so I was re-re-mounting, which was arriving at the shades of the ridiculous.

So, once again I went back to fstab research. It seems that everytime I "solve" this particular problem, I forget the answer from the previous go-round and also come up with a new and different one. Turns out that if I just went with ntfs-3g defaults 0 0, I would get the precise mounting that I wanted. That is, as the OpSu help page says, the same old "insecure" style of mount that Windows uses in the first place. Well, lah-de-dah. For my purposes, that is exactly what I wanted. Because as OpSu 11.2 set it up, I couldn't execute my scripts and my user could not read and write, which is relatively essential due to the way I have structured my encrypted document storage system (and re-inventing the wheel is not something I would like to face right at this moment.)

So, that was not self-curing. In fact, it is consistently wrecked everytime I upgrade and I wish OpSu would stop doing that.

The other problem -- the one in which my encrypted drive does not mount on boot? Fagedaboudit. I assume (maybe incorrectly) that it was an install glitch with OpSu 11.1 that survived the 11.2 upgrade.

But, considering all the issues my Sony Vaio has with Vista, it may be that there is some hardware/bios thing or other that is likewise a problem with Linux. if that's all there is, I can live with it -- and until I get iFolder fully implemented so I'm confident I don't stand to lose anything (not to mention get my document system fully implemented on a second system), I don't think I will be doing anymore clean installs.