LinuxPlanet: .comment: Brain-Munching Insects and SuSE 7.3

"...An unclean shutdown, of course, brings us our old friend e2fsck when one has not had access to Ext3. Though my 20-meg drive is small by current standards, it takes awhile. As it started, I noticed an error -- "Spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7" -- which I pondered until I saw that e2fsck wanted to be run manually on hda4, the residence of my home directory.

E2fsck was not kind to my home directory. When the smoke had cleared, it had moved a total of 475 megs of stuff, in two files, to lost+found. When it was all over and I was at a prompt, I SUed root and restored my backed up KDE and Qt. KDE started uneventfully, this time with my configuration entirely intact. Anti-aliasing was still but a dim and crippled shadow of its former self.

And when I opened KMail, I was singularly undelighted to discover that my Inbox, which contained about 1,500 messages, had disappeared. I have not yet discovered what else found its way into the 475 megs of stuff uselessly dumped into lost+found (the sheer size of which makes it all but impossible to sort out, too).

To top it all off, KDE shuts down just fine but something prevents my getting to a prompt -- and that same something keeps keyboard input from being heard by the machine -- meaning that I am at the mercy of uptime unless I want to give this bright and shiny new distribution another bite at my ~/. This is, um, unacceptable. No, it flat-out sucks."

Complete Story

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• FirstLinux.com: SuSE Linux Professional 7.3 Review(Oct 30, 2001)
• SuSE Linux 7.3 Now Shipping(Oct 25, 2001)
• LinuxPlanet: .comment: The Plateau(Oct 20, 2001)