Those who read should remember I recently shifted to gentoo on the linux portion of my PC. To start with it was a mixed blessing, although the pain it caused surpassed the returns it provided by a margin. I call it a mixed blessing because beneath the un-decipherable errors it daily popped onto my face and the oddities that happened just too often to be called oddities, I was getting my work done and my mp3s playing. About all I asked from a distribution. An unstable equilibrium, this soon collapsed. Thursday night as I got fed up with the system and life in general I decided to do something about it. Only, I thought gentoo was repairable. General precautionary updates to the world (world is the union of everything you've installed in gentoo) to opitmize my download times in addition to several other things in an attempt to restore normalcy to the dying beast only made it worse.
The first to breath its last was sound. But as all mighty warriors do after they die, it left its mark. Marks. I could feel its presence glorifying my system superficially whenever I typed lsmod. I could see its soul still stuck somewhere within my services, refusing to shut down or start well. I could sense its might whenever xmms crashed my system in an attempt to play Californication. It was all around me, trying to tell me something. Maybe a finger pointing towards its killer. Maybe.
Soon I decided I would not be defeated so easily. I ran an update to the world again. This time my nemesis greeted me with an error even google did no understand. This meant only one thing. The machine was alive. Yes, it could think enough to generate error statements never generated before, situations never encountered before. I was raging a battle against a 2.8 GHz monster who had now acquired evil. I felt like the people in the first scenes of Terminator 2.
Having lost on the world. I turned to sound again. I swear I believed I could resurrect it. But the evil had spread it seemed, for I was prompted with the very same error yet again trying to update sound.
I turned to my biggest weapon. The CD ROM drive and the hard reboot. I reinstalled linux. Since I wasn't willing to spend 3 days just to make my console work, I decided to go for something less than a do-everything-yourself kit. I installed Mandrake (or Mandriva). All this at 2:00 am.
Not doing much testing with the system I decided to sleep for I was born a human and to replenish lost energy and resources I need rest everyday. What I didn't realize though, was the fact that the machine would gear up by the time I got back to it. Next day as I rushed back from my class to relish on the sweet delicacies of last night's labour, I was faced with a no-sound distorted shell machine. Barely managing to avoid an artery-burst as I saw the fresh Mandrake install asking for gentoo files, I reloaded the CDs for a fresh install. And I pressed 20 nexts with trembling hands and waited, and waited.
And the rest is history. I now have a fully-working Mandrake system with no traces of gentoo and a sufficiently working sound system.
...and its 1:00 am. I should sleep.
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