Miracles Do Happen
Snipbit from My LiveJournal Entry: "Oops, ya broke it"

I attempted to install VMWare - but, during the configuration, it asked where my kernel source files were located at, since it couldn't find them in the usual directory. Well, I didn't install them when I installed SUSE 9.3 a few months ago, so I decided to install it now.

This is where I found out what a mess my system really was. YaST was running like it usually does, and asked me for the CD that had the installation file on it that it needed. When I inserted the CD, the program didn't recognize it as being inserted. The operating system saw the disc, but YaST didn't.

That's when I checked "Installation Source" in YaST - which said "cd:///;devices=/dev/sr0" sr0!?! sr0 was changed ages ago to hda! It doesn't even see the CD drive because it's looking at a different mount point. But no matter how many times I tried to edit it, or add a second source location, it wouldn't let me. So I decided to try something stupid... Delete the entry and create a new one. Each time, the same error would pop up: unable to access protocol 'cd:///' - so, now I've got a SUSE 9.3 system with no installation media able to attach to it, many different applications and services broken because of the change from /dev/sr0 to /dev/hda, and a stack of recently downloaded SUSE 10.0 cds just laying around.

What do you think I did? YUP, installed SUSE 10.0 OSS (Open Source Software only) on my main system without ever testing it. Now, I had used SUSE 10.0 RC1 before, which sucked, but I needed to get my system up and running correctly again, and doing a fresh install was going to be the best way to do that.

Unfortunately, there was some problems with the installer. First, my attempt at upgrading the system yielded some broken packages during the installer, so I had to abort. I decided to try again - this time doing a clean install (formatting the necessary partitions and installing SUSE 10 with no previous operating system installed) - which seems to have worked.

I've had a few problems though - which are causing me to think that SUSE 10 may have been a bad idea. My most notable is the fact that I have no audio on the system anymore. I'm getting the same driver issue that I had in SUSE 10.0 RC1 - when I go into YaST, it will say that the IO or IRQ Address is not set correctly- it just started happening after I did the YOU critical updates. But, I can't tell which one screwed over the sound drivers. This may be of some relevance: I didn't have sound before - it's just now that it is accompanied by an error message.

To make this already horrendously long story a little shorter, I believe that I shall install 9.3 again... Maybe one of these days Novell will release a version of SUSE (above 9.3) that will work with my sound card. I'll probably still work with 10 on Experiment 8 here eventually.

Well, that was quite the mess. And now the conclusion...
I went to bed early that morning, leaving SUSE 9.3 running install-apt4suse and some YaST updates. When I got up, I checked the system, and everything seemed fine, but when I logged into KDE, the GUI was totally distorted: this is a screen shot I tried to take of my desktop... It was actually a look at Konqueror displaying a directory with a severely distorted background making GUI navigation impossible. Unfortunately, the display errors also seemed to have caused issues with KSnapShot. After working with the system for a few hours, and using YaST, YOU, and apt-get (using apt, since I forgot to install KPackage - which I couldn't find on the installation CD or in apt-get itself) I noticed that I had forgot to install some software when I did the initial install of the operating system, and some of these not-installed items may be causing some of the system's problems.

So, after really deliberating on the topic, I decided that it was time to try to reinstall the operating system: for the third time in less than 24 hours. The debate was, should I go with 9.3 - which was currently causing me some problems, making it impossible to use, or should I go with 10, and try to fix the audio issues. I decided that I had loved my 9.3 installation, so I decided to give it another chance (especially since I believe that it was user error that cause the installation to fail last time). This time, the install went on perfectly. Like my previous installation of 9.3, I used YOU to get the critical updates and installed install-apt4suse without logging in. By the time everything was done, and I decided to log in, it was now just a matter of getting everything back to the way it was before I broke everything... Which was actually a simple process...

Sometimes, it just doesn't feel like I "formatted" the partition
In Windows, doing a format of the partition and then installing Windows will load up a "vanilla" version of the OS - and the user has to configure every-little-thing... Well, in Linux (SUSE 9.3 specifically) I mounted my /home on a separate partition from / - which was a good idea. With each install of a different version of SUSE, it would always remember the oddest things... Where my K-bar was located at, if I had amaroK running (and what was in my playlist), it even remember my icon positions!

The only issue was that some of the applications that the system was pointing to were long gone. Sunbird and Thunderbird (both from Mozilla Foundation) weren't installed, but their application links that I had were still there. It only took me an hour or so to update all the software to get the system back to running like it did before all my troubles occurred.

And the soure of my insanity: "'cd:///;devices=/dev/sr0' sr0!?! sr0 was changed ages ago to hda! It doesn't even see the CD drive because it's looking at a different mount point! I should just install the newest SUSE to fix this!"

--Well, that's one way to get the job done... I just didn't think that I'd end up right back with SUSE 9.3