Oh well dammit

[music | Nine Inch Nails - Fixed (Remixed by Coil)]

I'm going to go buy an Abacus tomorrow. Hopefully I can compile Firefox on it and go about my merry way.

Suffice to say, SuSE 10.0 didn't help things any. About 3 hours into my evening, while I was copying my backup .tars back over from my fileserver, New Install started locking up, specifically, X started restarting. While trying to figure that out, I got a bunch of kernel panics, rebooted, corrupted FS. While running reiserfsck --rebuild-tree, I got another kernel panic. There goes that install.

Please note that this machine was, yesterday, SUPER reliable. Only after I fucked with its flow did it decide to be a bitch. The only thing I can think of is that the NVidia drivers, which I KNOW it hated, were still getting LKM'd even though I ripped it out of xorg.conf. I had had the X or KDE crashing problem earlier, any time you tried to do anything that had any GL mode, it would kill X. I changed video drivers from nvidia to "nv" and it stopped happening, of course I can't run anything accelerated either, but hey, problem for another day right?

Next step, I guess, reinstall again, refuse to load the commercial drivers and don't upgrade the kernel from YAST at install time, and see how it performs, then start adding stuff back until I break it again, meantime checking newsgroups for any other instances of these issues. I guess. Or I just go out and buy more Macs that I can't afford.

This is all, of course, after I had fucked with the graphics settings, got Firefox all updated with all the extensions I like, reimported a few GB of data that I had backed up, all that kind of stuff. I was really about to shut it down and call it a day as soon as I untarred my backups.

I can say that it seemed to be complaining specifically about HID problems in the kernel panic (at least the last one, which was the only one I actually had a chance to read since VI crashed on me twice). I hope my Microsoft wireless USB mouse stupidity isn't causing this. I have taken my nice Logitech and put it on the Mac, and the PC now has a wireless MS mushymouse thingy which I hate. But since my KVM is the way it is, I have to unplug all the keyboards from it and unplug my PC from power every time I change the mouse. I love my computers more by the minute.

I've never had a Mach kernel panic on OSX, yet...Just sayin'.

Update
2 days later I exchanged the drive, after running all the Maxtor super-duper test software and having it return fine, and it's been working perfectly since.