A series of unfortunate events

The seeds were sown yesterday when the system would not power off after a shutdown command. The system remained unresponsive after displaying the "sending term signal". After waiting for the usual time, I did a manual shutdown with the restart and power down buttons.

Today morning the series began. The system would not boot to the desktop but stopped with a series of permission denied messages. The use of the "Scroll Lock" button, something that I had never felt the use for for over a decade, allowed me to make out the messages as they quickly scrolled. A few files were identified.

Thinking this could be a result of the improper shutdown, I concluded running the fsck command on that partition would help. Since the system even couldn't boot to the command prompt, running it from the same system was not possible. Ofcourse, at the point I noted that an explicit boot option to boot to the console was missing.

Booting with the PCLinux live CD, I ran the fsck command. Way too many inodes were found out of order. After the sweep, I tried booting from the hard disk. No luck.

Had this been Windows, the next logical step would be a repair install. This is the first area where I felt Linux is a major let down. For one it makes life difficult by having too frequent disk errors (this could also be because one of my RAM modules is not error free, though this fact does not seem to affect normal working). Secondly, a repair reinstall is not available in most distros. I have seen this in, probably, just Sabayon- though even there it is accompanied by a message that it takes a lot of time but works.

PCLinux does not offer a repair option, so thinking a reinstall on the partition without formatting would work just as well, I proceeded with the install. At the partition selection step, I selected the older partition as "/" mount point but disabled the format option. Imagine my shock when the next step still gave a warning that all content on the drive will be erased! I quickly backed out. Then I copied all files under the home folder from the older partition to a safer place and returned to the reinstall step. During the backing up process I made a useful discovery, that the downloaded packages of Synaptic are stored under /var/. I had searched for *wine*.*. To return, the format option was disabled, yet the warning came on, but it did not format the drive! The installation proceeded and after the boot loader was installed, I shutdown the system.

The corrupt RAM was weighing on my mind, and I blamed it for the Azureus phenomenon ( Azureus would complete download of a torrent, check it, find peices missing, download these peices, recheck again, still peices would be missing, and the cycle continued a few more times, before the check was satisfactorily completed. Many times the extra MBs downloaded would be just a small fraction of the total file size, but occassionally, somewhere like 50-75 MB would be downloaded after the entire file had been completed. The corrupt RAM could be causing the hash failures, I conjectured.). The solution would be to add the drive to another system where the RAM was error free. Since the earlier experience of Linux taking hardware changes in it's stride, I was confident that there would be no hiccups. Linux surprised again.

But, I was so convinced that it was a lingering problem with the previous corrupt installation that I did not immediately switch to the older configuration. On the new system, I discovered that not only would not the freshly reinstalled system not work, nor would any Live CD as well. Belenix, PCLinux, Freespire, all failed to properly boot, crashing before the desktop showed up. Kubuntu managed to deliver the desktop, though. Another fsck followed. Eventually, better sense prevailed and I restored the older association, and the reinstallation booted normally. In hindsight, it seems that the reason none of the live CDs booted properly could have been because the motherboard, being quite recent - based on the geforce 7050 onboard graphics chipset - the proper drivers may be missing. A VI of one of the non GUI loaded installations xorg.conf file showed that the contents under the device section were correct - nvidia.

After the reinstallation experience, I discovered that the network would not work in the reinstalled system. All attempts to reconfigure, delete and create a network connection failed, leaving me with no net access. To make things worse, Synaptic too began playing truant. I had hoped that the reinstallation would've made some changes so that this time Wine installation would proceed more smoothly. Dashed. Synaptic would show up on the taskbar and then close. So the Wine experiment could not be done.
Since I had backed up all files, I copied them back into the earlier locations. I had recreated the same user and root accounts with no password in both during the reinstallation. Azureus would not load, till I deleted the older .azureus folder under the account's home folder.

Overall this took almost the entire working day. And at the end of it I was still without a net connection. Which leads me to the point where a complete reinstall is needed.

The experience has been informative. I found out where the synaptic download folder is. I disovered that there are limits to which Linux can accomodate new hardware, which brings be to the need to learn how to install drivers during installation. I revisited Kubuntu, and reexperienced the marvel that is Dolphin - the file manager, also found that it is the one distro which mentioned Wine in the most logical way - as an option in the Control panel offering to run Windows applications (Wine is NOT preinstalled though). I recollected that Opensuse is not a Live CD.