oh, the horror

By basd on Dec 1, 2011 | In kde4, opensuse, -arghhh!!

Well, the desktop on my main computer ... which I have been diligently leaving in stable OpSu 11.4 ... got wiped out by an update and a repository issues. I wish they would push some sort of warning when the repository system changes. These sorts of surprises are not fun.

...

I'm not entirely clear on what happened. Part of it is my over-aggressive repository selection to start with. I think Tumbleweed *assumes* we have now changed from "11.4" to "current" repositories, so that in the new scheme version updates will be seamless (except for the part where legacy settings start making a mess of things, but that is my update method aleady ...)

They seem to have made the same change with respect to KDE repositories ... instead of having 4.6, 4.7, 4.7rc, etc., it *appears* they have also now gone to the "current" scheme. I mean, these changes make sense. But ... if you don't know they are being made, yikes!

So I ended up updated to KDE 4.7 from 4.6, but there were software version issues and things (such as the Suse Studio Imagewriter) stopped working. Oh, and programs (like YAST) that needed root privileges ceased having a root login window popup.

"Solving" the problem, I removed Tumbleweed and the KDE repositories and did a zypper dup (distro update). Theoretically (my theory, perhaps not zypper's theory) was that I would now have rolled back to a plain vanilla install.

Only thing is, once you have 4.7 settings, apparently 4.6 is in crash mode. So, with autologin enabled I was magically in a crashed and non-functional desktop (as in, can't shutdown, can't do nuttin'). I started grub with option "3" to go to a console login (I am so GLAD I finally learned that was how to get a console login). I used console YAST to turn off autologin. I logged in to IceWM desktop (always have this handy) and killed the .kde and .kde4 folders. I installed the new KDE "current" repositories and zypper dup'd again.

Yay, I was back to a functional desktop. Only thing was that since I have a highly customized desktop, there was a lot of setup to do. Fortunately, I maintain most of my desktop panel icons in the ~/bin directory so I can at least drag and drop them back into place once I had the four panels, etc.

Doesn't seem like anything is broken.

But, major arghhh!!

In theory, this is the pain that goliath1 will avoid, if and when I get it up to speed and a mirror image of my normal desktop system. As if.