Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Slackware-current is at RC5, as of 21 September

Yes, this is the longest string of RC status ever. Pat promises that this will be the last version before release. There's still a good bit of changelog activity, though.

Also, I've lost my Slackware tower. Well, its still here, but one of the drives went corrupt. I saw a ton of corruption in my Slack install's dmesg that didn't clear after doing an fsck. If anything it got a LOT worse. Luckily, I'd just done a backup of my /home dir to another drive, LIKE 5 MIN BEFORE THE DRIVE STARTED THROWING ERRORS! Talk about lucky. Now, I have an issue. This tower doesn't have a floppy drive (although I can hook one up). I need a floppy so I can boot up using a WinXP or MSDOS floppy that contains the format command...you see, I have to clear lilo from the boot drive's MBR before I can be able to use the system again, as the system currently tries to boot me into the bad drive (which I've removed...I'll double-check later whether its salvagable or not).

I guess this means I'm in the market for a new hard disk. This is the perfect opportunity for me to get another SATA drive, preferrably higher capacity than my 160GB drive. The drive that went corrupt was a Maxtor 60GB drive that I bought around 1999-2000...talk about long lived. What brand will I get next? Most likely a Seagate or Maxtor. I may get another 160GB Seagate so that I can give RAID a go (I've an onboard SATA RAID controller).

For now, I've no working Slackware machine...OK, shoot me cuz I just lied. I've my Dell Inspiron 8500 and my Toshiba Satellite 1GHz. Both need to be rsync'd, which means I have to use CAT5 to do the sync...last time I did an rsync over wifi, it wasn't pretty.

Anyways, I've my work cut out for me for the next two weeks. AND, I've to study so I can take the CCSA and CCSE exams.

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