Bad update! BAD!

On Monday evening, just before calling it a night, I decided to attend to that little 'updates available my OpenSUSE 11.1 notebook. There were half a dozen updates, one of them being a kernel update, which doesn't happen too often.  A few minutes later, I rebooted, and got nothing but a text login. Couldn't start X or even reconfigure it.  Then I noticed that there was no networking, and only a small handful of modules loaded -- I looked at loaded modules to try to figure out why I wasn't getting networking, even via my wired Ethernet port. Something had gone wrong with the update, a process that normally causes me no grief at all.

I tried several things, then gave up for the night. Next morning, I went looking for the problem, hoping it wouldn't cut too deeply into my day. The kernel package had installed, but kernel-base wasn't there and neither was kernel-extras -- that kind of explained the problem with missing modules. Okay, can't get networked, can't transfer files via my USB memory stick, and can't do a lot of other things. Time for the old bootable CD trick. The first I got my hands on, ironically, was Mandriva 2008.1 which I had previously installed on this notebook and later erased to load up OpenSUSE 11.1.

Once booted into Mandriva (which worked beautifully), I surfed over to the OpenSUSE update repositories for 11.1, located all the updated kernel packages and copied them to the mounted hard disk partition (which Mandriva had helpfully found and mounted for me automatically) in the /root folder. After thanking Mandriva, I shut down and rebooted in OpenSUSE 11.1 and logged in as root. Then, I tried to install the kernel updates. They failed. Apparently a conflict with ndiswrapper and VIrtualBox's Xorg driver. Okay . . . A little cursing, that kernel updates shouldn't go ahead at all if all the packages can't install properly, followed. Aside from the lunacy of allowing this, my failed kernel update deleted the old kernel so I had no way back. Duh! But I digress . . .

I removed both packages (and their associated required packages (one each) then tried installing the kernel update again, this time successfully.

One reboot later and everything was working normally.

So, what had I learned? Mostly what I already knew -- first, don't panic. Second, it pays to always have a decent bootable CD/DVD close at hand, just in case. Third, don't panic. Fourth, that no distribution is perfect, which I also knew, but is important to keep in context. I remember a year or two ago when an Ubuntu update killed X and left thousands of users staring at a text login. Fifth, don't panic. Sixth, I'm sure I'll think of something.

Oh, yeah, and make sure to regularly back up your system. Stuff happens. It's good to know that if disaster strikes and you can't possible fix things, you can always reinstall and restore your data.

Oh, and don't panic.