ratcreature | skip this if computer rants bore you...

I'm having a craptastic evening, thanks to my frelling computer. It started innocently enough, this afternoon I ran one of the regular auto-updates my linux distribution provides, so that security fixes (and other bug fixes too) will be installed. I shutdown my computer everything seemed well, I went to my comic store, read some good comics (that is all the pre-craptastic part, when I fully expected the day to turn out really well), and then about three hours ago I wanted to turn on my computer (to write an entry about the comics I read). It hung during the boot process, it wouldn't start usb hotplugging. I had no idea what to do, then I figured out how to start a bare-bones rescue system, and tried to find some configuration file that would allow me to turn off the usb hotplugging script in the boot sequence. Previously I only changed the boot settings in the administration GUI. I finally settled for removing the hotplugging script from the respective init.d foldersr. Afterwards I could at least boot my computer again, though I also had to change to booting without trying to start X-Windows, because it didn't find the driver for my graphics card anymore. I guess it is because the security updates included a kernel update and my boot procedure isn't entirely regular, and I didn't adjust things manually. It might be something else. Right now the problem isn't fixed, I merely succeeded in loading my graphics card driver manually. I decided that I really need to backup my system (my last backup is from May) before I attempt to fix this in case something goes really wrong, as it inevitably does.

I hope to return to the regularly scheduled Batverse obsession soon, however if you don't see any posts about Nightwing #83, Gotham Knights #43, or the Haunted Knight TPB in the near future, I most likely managed to break my computer further during my attempts to fix things...

You know, before I tried to boot my computer I was only annoyed about comic editing that leads to things like that displaying naked, mutilated corpses hanging from the ceiling is okay without a mature readers label as long as the female breasts though naked are yet drawn without nipples (it took me a moment to figure out why one of the corpses looked so weird), and the crotch area is without pubic hair (in case you wonder which comic I mean, look at Arrowsmith #1, page 20, by Kurt Busiek an Carlos Pacheco). That however, has moved way down on my annoyances list.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Thanks for the hug, however I doubt the CSS has anything to do with it, unless looking at it works as bad luck charm, which I wouldn't rule out completely, though.

No, I think this is fully thanks to my graphic card needing a proprietary driver that I need to update with the kernel, the fact that my kernel, the initial ramdisk image and the kernel module maps aren't in their regular place (for various reasons to do with my hard disk setup and bootloader/bios problem which I couldn't resolve otherwise when I updated my linux to its current version) so that the automatic update system won't find them, yet won't give an error, because it modifies other versions which it thinks are the ones accessed in the boot process, but I have to copy those manually to a different hard disk, but I tend to forget to do the assorted, necessary arcane voodoo manually...

As of now I'm still making backups (and printing some documentation on the newer version of the graphics card driver) before attempting to fix stuff... *sigh*

I really wonder whether the security fix preventing some buffer overflow somewhere was worth this.

skip this if computer rants bore you...

Re: it's my fault!