Ugh!

Today has been a solidly foul day, based largely on the fact that the Linux box is still down, and an hour spent this morning trying to revive it accomplished squat. What few annoyances I encountered at the store tended to exacerbate themselves, including The Packaging Job from Hades.

I got some advice via IRC (download a 4-disk core debian distro that would put my machine on the network), but it fell short. For some reason, the floppy disk drive doesn't appear to work; the system won't examine an inserted disk while attempting to boot (when it should), nor will it mount the drive in 'linux rescue' mode.

OTOH, I took one of the cannibalized drives from the IBM and "installed" it on 'onegin' (it's sitting on top of the unit), and find that the drive is recognized and appears to have an ext2 file system on it.

When I get home, I plan to do a 'linux rescue' startup, mount the appropriate partitions on the two drives, and then back up my critical files from 'onegin' onto the cannibalized drive.

Then I'm going to reinstall RedHat 7.1, taking care not to format the /home partition.

Cheers...

So far, everything is going according to plan...

...which would be, of course, the ideal time for everything to go wrong!

But so far, my plan seems to be working. I copied my personal files and the old /etc directory onto the drive I have sitting on top of a piece of plastic (a CD case) on top of 'onegin'. I then commenced an install of Red Hat 7.1, which I know will boot (since it did so previously). It will take me a bit of time to tweak everything back into place, but the major item - e-mail - is also the best understood (at least as soon as I install a postfix binary). I must also remember to run tripwire immediately upon booting up for the first time.

* * *Galina and I watched From Hell last night, starring Johnny Depp. The story puts a new twist on the tale of Jack the Ripper, and while it succeeds in painting Whitechapel of some eleven decades ago as a pretty dreary place, I suspect it's nowhere near as dreary as it actually was, especially in light of the love interest between Depp's character - a police inspector who finds inspiration, and perhaps premonitions, in his opium-laudanum-absynthe-induced dreams - and a very vivacious Mary Kelly, who was the last of the Ripper's victims. I found the ending a bit puzzling, too, but that's of little consequence, and a bit anticlimactic.

* * *No calls or important e-mails today, which is both good and bad. Good, because it took me a while to overcome my dark purple funk and go online to my ISP's Web-based e-mail page, where I found nothing waiting (one of my Houston clients has begun to send me stuff without calling in advance, and it wouldn't do to have an assignment sit around for a day or so, gathering moss). Bad, because as is the case with many translators, my palms start to sweat a little when nobody calls for a couple of days.

* * *The hum of the CD-ROM on 'onegin' has changed, and the install screen shows that the format of the requested partitions is complete (/home was specifically excluded from the format, along with the /archive partition on the piggybacked disk) . Package installation has begun as I type this.

* * *Upon reflection, the fiasco with the upgrade to Red Hat 7.2 is the second such event in a row, though when it originally happened during the 7.1 install with 'onegin', there were no files of any consequence on the machine. The 'fix' for that problem was, literally, to junk the Cyrix that came with the machine (as described in my post of last August 23).

Now, with the failure of the upgrade to boot (somewhere in the research I did regarding the kernel panic due to init not running, there was mention of how the kernel image in some distros uses an improper instruction to start the init program, which is way beyond my desired level of expertise, hence the current brouhaha), it is clear to me that Red Hat's "out-of-the-box" distros are highly suspect. However, before I get really wrapped around the axle with this, let me make sure I can restore the system to approximately where it was a couple of days ago.

Cheers...