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Old 02-24-2003, 09:26 AM   #1
bogler
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Registered: Oct 2002
Location: Bonny Scotland
Distribution: RedHat 8.0/Gentoo
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most frustrating linux problem


what's the most frustrating linux problem you've had recently?

Mine was a problem concerning my Hauppauge TV card. I had it working under both RedHat and Gentoo, it was perfect, fullscreen, the works.

Anyay, one day i turned on my PC and started xawtv to find a really noisy picture (unwatchable). I tried again, same thing. So i figured it must be the tuning so i ran scantv. It didin't pick up any channels, i double checked the settings and tried again, same result.

By this stage, frustred, i figured it must be the PCI card so i went doen to the shop and bought another card. Took the back off the machine and inserted, rebooted and the picture was still crap.

Rather angry and feeling foolish by now, i recomiled a gentoo kernel - no dice. I took the back off the machine and swapped PCI bays around - no dice. I bought new cables (coaxial) and tried - no dice, i event tried a new jack on the cables. All of this while re-compiling bttv, modprobeing etc etc etc etc etc

By this stage i had spent many hours and quite a few quid trying to fix my TV card. I figured the only thing left to try was the aerial on the roof. I phoned a company to come and check it. When the van was pulling up to my house i could see the driver notice something on my roof. I asked him and he replied that the cable was broken and he could see it from there. 2 minutes later my TV card was running like a dream!

D'Oh! Hours of work and approx $200 later my TV was back.

Now that was frustrating...

Last edited by bogler; 02-24-2003 at 02:43 PM.
 
Old 02-24-2003, 10:15 AM   #2
artemis
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Registered: Feb 2002
Location: London
Distribution: Fedora 2, Red Hat 8.0
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Spending a whole week trying to troubleshoot a SCSI scanner and a new SCSI cable and card. Didn't work, and I never found out whether the problem was in the scanner, card or cable.

And then shortly afterwards, my entire RH 8.0 system wouldn't boot... collapsed, failed on boot-up, kept throwing me into repair mode. Is this FRUSTRATING or what? I didn't even do anything that might have resulted in this... no fiddling with bootup parameters, no kernel compiles, etc. All I did was download some RPM software from external websites (Lyx, KFish).
I'm beginning to wonder if Linux is really as stable as people claim it to be.

art
 
Old 02-24-2003, 11:02 AM   #3
crashmeister
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Registered: Feb 2002
Distribution: t2 - trying to anyway
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My most frustrating problem is that my debian partition always keeps getting corrupted when I just got it right and there is no way to get it to work again because it always insists that the hd is shot.Strange enough - there are no bad sectors and when I put another distro on the same partition it is fine forever.
Oh artemis - getting non RH rpm's into a RH box w/o breaking things can be a bitch - those guys are going M$.You get it from us or it probably wont work.
 
Old 02-24-2003, 11:22 AM   #4
Mara
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Registered: Feb 2002
Location: Grenoble
Distribution: Debian
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My old CDROM... Never worked. No drivers.
 
Old 02-24-2003, 09:03 PM   #5
cuckoopint
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Registered: Feb 2003
Distribution: Debian
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my windows never seemed to work well with linu- ....oh, wait.....doh!



Nope, havent had too many problems. one of the funniest was figuring out how to install X on debian with no online resources and a blank console staring me in the face.
 
Old 02-25-2003, 02:25 AM   #6
m0rl0ck
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Registered: Nov 2002
Distribution: A totally 133t distro :)
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I had a problem with font sizes but I think its fixed.
 
Old 02-25-2003, 04:34 AM   #7
artemis
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Registered: Feb 2002
Location: London
Distribution: Fedora 2, Red Hat 8.0
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I know, I probably tried to install a non RH 8.0 RPM and it blew up.... I think it was a RH 7.2, but there were no RH8.0 rpms around. This is most dreadful. What distro would you guys recommend as an easy-migration, Mandrake? (I am an avid KDE user, and am v.annoyed with Red Hat breaking things so that I can no longer compile KDE apps from source and install them and expect them to work easily.

Boo, Red Hat!
 
Old 02-25-2003, 04:45 AM   #8
crashmeister
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Registered: Feb 2002
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Yeah - I read an interview with the boss ot Kompany and he wasn't too happy about the RH way of changing things.
I did install Mandrake 9.0 the other day and the install went fine except for graphics.
But if you are into compiling things yourself you might want to look into a non-rpm distro.Judging by the interview all the rpm distros modify things to some extent - especially with kde that can cause trouble if you install something from another source.
 
  


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