[PLUG] Dapper + Reiser

[John Jason Jordan]

OK, I had to reformat that old Breezy partition because "sudo apt-get
dist update" got it so mucked up there was no hope. And I wanted to try
out Reiserfs, because everyone seems to think it's a lot faster than
ext3.

So I stuck the Dapper-64 DVD in the drive and restarted the computer.
When the live version came up it had an icon on the desktop labeled
INSTALL in very large letters. I proceeded to install. Except that the
only way you can install and reformat a partition at the same time is
to use ext3. Reiserfs is not an option. However, since I was actually
running Dapper-64 from the CD, I just exited from the Install utility
and used Disk Manager, which was happy to format the partition
Reiserfs. Then I went back and installed Dapper-64 on it. I had to undo
all the defaults to do so, because it still insisted on reformatting
it. But it did recognize the reiserfs filesystem, and after poking at
it a bit I figured out how to make it work.

Then I spent the next eight hours trying to get it all configured the
way I want it. That included two hours trying to figure out why the
Ubuntu wiki instructions to get wireless up and running worked fine on
the test setup, but wouldn't work this time. (Still not resolved.) And
I spent more hours reinstalling applications, trying to get my configs
transferred over, etc. Finally I got all that done, but I noticed that
nothing could see my fonts. They were in a Fonts folder in /home/jjj,
which worked fine in Breezy, but I guess not in Dapper. So I proceeded
to move them all to /usr/share/fonts. That part actually worked using
the GUI drag and drop. But I guess it's because they were not inside
folders. Anyway, I got all but the OpenType fonts in, and decided I
wanted to make a separate folder for them. And then I discovered that
it never occurred to any of the Nautilus developers that a user might
want to create a folder. No buttons for that. So I fired up Konqueror,
but it wouldn't come up, even though I had been using it earlier.
Neither would Krusader. Or XFE. This was too much. Something bad must
be going on. 

I decided to restart. But when I hit the Shutdown icon, it started to
shut down, then suddenly X came back, then it disappeared and it went
back to shutting down, then X reappeared, and back and forth for a
while. Then a window popped up with a wonderful error message that said
"the graphical subsystem has been shut down and restarted six times in
the last 90 seconds. This probably means something really bad is going
on." (I swear, that is what it said. Now where would you get something
as pungent as that in Windows?) So I decided to hit the power button
and restart.

It started back up, but X wouldn't start. It just kept trying and
failing and trying and failing. I didn't wait for the "six times" error
message. I just hit the power button. 

Then I tried the second choice for this installation -- the 15-23
kernel instead of the 15-25 that is the top choice. The 15-23 one never
even got to trying to start X. It hung on "loading hardware drivers."
That's probably because I had been using nothing but the 15-25, so that
is the kernel that the drivers were set up for. (Just a guess.)

At that point I decided to go back to this test/rescue installation. I
figured it was set to mount hda2 automatically during boot, so I could
use it to poke around and maybe figure out what is wrong. Well, what
was wrong was Reiserfs. In the middle of booting the test installation
announced that there was a bad superblock on hda2 and it could not
mount it. From reading the rest of the error message, it was clear that
Dapper-64 cannot mount a Reiserfs partition. It did not even recognize
it, hence the "bad superblock" message.

So my new installation is borked. Won't boot and I don't have an easy
way to get at the partition. Not that I have much likelihood of
figuring out what is wrong anyway. Tomorrow I'll have to start over.
Eight hours down the tube. But just think how much I have learned about
Linux! <sigh>

Oh, and Reiserfs is no faster than ext3. 

But while writing this chapter in the saga of How Not to Install Linux,
It occurrred to me that I should just use this test installation to
reformat the 60 GB hda2 partition (as ext3), then copy absolutely
everything from the test installation to hda2. I can use Aaron's rescue
CD that I copied at the last clinic, and I even wrote down the copy
syntax. Not sure how Grub will take that, though. But it's worth a
shot. And if it doesn't work, I'll learn even more about How Not to
Install Linux!