[PlanetCCRMA] odd behavior of my linux

[Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano]

> It really drives me crazy.

Sometimes it does drive me crazy too :-) But very seldom...

> I have used for days now redhat 8 + Planet ccrma, I rebooted many times my 
> laptop (partly because of rosegarden hanging my machine). So I know that the
> lowlat kernel 2.4.19 works. And today, I rebooted, no pcmcia, no alsa.

I assume you rebooted into 2.4.19? (which means it was there and
installed). After a reboot you can look at the boot messages in detail
by doing a "dmesg|more" or look into /var/log/messages for clues as to
why things failed to start. 

> I rebooted once again with the old kernel, launched synaptic. Synaptic
> told me that the lowlat 2.4.19 kernel is not installed (it was!!) so I
> installed once again. 

This is very strange. Did you do any other application installs in
between? Unlike other operating systems linux is not subjected to
"application rot", and things do not get uninstalled or corrupted behind
your back (I hope). 

> Pcmcia works now, but not alsa. I'm gonna re-install alsa, but that's
> really odd. 

To see what kernels you have installed do (from a command line as
root).   
  rpm -q -a | grep ^kernel
  rpm -q -a | grep ^kernel-up
And for alsa:
  rpm -q -a | grep ^alsa-

You should try to look at the error messages in more detail before
reinstalling packages. Reinstalling is usually not going to solve the
real cause of the problem. There is no reason (if you normally work as a
normal non-root user) for applications to get uninstalled or modified.
This assumes that you are using packages and not installing extra
software or drivers or whatnot through tarballs (configure/make/make
install). 

> There was an apt-conf problem discussed here, is it what's driving me crazy
> me?

Hard to know without more data. If you have updated to the latest
apt/synaptic you need to change apt.conf. If you update to the latest
kernel as well you need to modify the sources.list file (see detailed
instructions in the changelog in the Planet CCRMA pages). 

> I was a mandrake user (still on one machine) and switched to redhat 8 for 
> planet ccrma. But now planet ccrma seems to focus on redhat 9.0. 

Not really. I've been busy redoing Planet CCRMA for 9, but that's just
because it is new and had no support at all before. Bringing it up to
the same state of other versions takes a while. 

> It's really a pain in ass always upgrading. 

Yep, that's true. On the other hand you are not forced to upgrade, if
your machine is working fine and you are happy with your applications
then do not upgrade anything :-) Change can be good or bad depending on
what is important for you. In the case of linux and audio/music/video
change is good (from my viewpoint) because more applications are
available and/or newer versions bring new features or fix bugs (or
create new bugs, of course :-)

-- Fernando