It all started Friday night with problems playing a DVD using vlc.  SO, I check and there is an upgrade.  I install it, but the problem is not fixed.  There is a beta.  I go to install it and the installer announces a huge long list of updates available.  I run SuSE on this machine and they did make a new release Thursday.  I agreed and let it do its thing.  I did my evening rowing exercise while it ran.  Some while later it announces that it has problems.  I look to find that it's converted about half of the system from 64-bit to 32-bit and there is general confusion among the software.  An hour of trying to undo this leaves the system still very confused.

I gave up and contemplated whether to do a fresh install of the OpenSuse 11.0 or the new 11.1.  (When this started I had my Winders system start downloading the 11.1 image.  It's big.  It's 4.5 GB.  The download prediction was completion mid-morning on Saturday.)  I started the 11.0 re-install and went out to do preliminary shoveling while it worked.  The install failed.  It reported a corrupt media.  I cleaned the DVD with my lens cleaning tools, but media check of the DVD still shows corrupt media despite clean shiny scratch free surface.  (Digital signatures good.  DVD bad.)  Don't believe people who claim long life for writable DVDs.

Saturday morning I burned the new 11.1 DVD and did an install.  It went well, but I had some problems getting window manager selection tied to user ID.  The Gnome login manager changed noticably between versions.  Then I made the really big mistake.  I accidentally pushed the standby button.  The system went into la-la land.  It wouldn't boot.  This is a workstation not a laptop.  It doesn't have the swap area set up for standby or the ACPI configured for it.  I tried the repair option of the install DVD, which after a while was able to repair the data partitions but announced that the boot partition and block were not repairable.  It wanted permission to re-partition and re-install.

My next step was to switch DVDs, boot my Knoppix live-DVD, and start a backup of everything to a backup USB disk.  (There is about 80GB to backup.  Even at 20MB/s this takes a while.)   All of the previous steps had been preserving the user partition.  I keep the disk partitioned so that Linux is on one partition and home is on another.  This allows a total re-install to reformat just the Linux partition while preserving the home partition.  I had a Thursday routine backup, but why not save Friday's changes.  While it ran, I shoveled the snow, went to the cafe, had lunch, etc.

I then did a complete fresh install, including re-partition, which did reformat the home partition.  Everything (almost) went OK.  The user data is restored, and I have one problem.  My sound is not working.  I had this same problem on the same model hardware when I installed the latest service pack for Windows XP.  The generic drivers only activate the audio plugs on the back of the machine, not the plugs on the front.  I want to connect to the front because I sometimes swap in headphones, etc.  I had to find and install upgraded vendor drivers to make XP work.  I have not found the right configuration information for Linux yet.  There is hope.  I found the driver that lists this motherboard model number, but not the information on how to configure it properly.  (I'll bet I have to download the source and read it.)

Other than that, OpenSuSE 11.1 is a pretty nice package.  The install is quite user friendly.  If you want minimal fuss, you answer a dozen questions along the lines of "Do you do C/C++ development?" and "Is this going to be a news/mail server?" then let it run.  It will do the rest for you.  It got everything but the sound right.  If you want to customize some more (like I did) you can tweak the list of software packages, etc. quite easily.  I always add windowmaker and dovecot.  Windowmaker is because I prefer that window environment over the "let's not confuse the victims of Winders brain damage with a different approach to window management" alternatives.  Dovecot is just because it uses old-format unix mail files instead of a DBMS, like Cyrus.  The default IMAP server chosen by OpenSuse is Cyrus.  It's a better choice for a high capacity highly featured IMAP server.

Now I can return to my original plans for the weekend, plus the unfortunate necessity of more snow shoveling: re-learning how to touch type.

My new keyboard arrived on Friday.  I need to do the practice exercises to re-learn how to touch type with it.  Touch typing is more important with it.  GIlamonstre forgot to mention that it's hard to see the keys.  Your hands block the view.  Touch typing is a necessity.  It looks weird in real life too.