TheSeatOfMyPants's Journal: fstabbing it to death

When Linux is good, it's very, very good...but when it's bad...

I've been using Linux for 5 years now, and 99% of the time, I'm perfectly happy telling others how easy it is to use, about the stability, lack of need to rely on the console. The other 1% of the time, though, it manages to come up with problems out of left field that are a serious bitch to make sense of even with the console, let alone fix. You know, those fun ones where either there's no error filed or displayed, or it's in such an obscure place that your chances of finding it listed on the web are slim at best.

For example, my current issue: for seemingly no reason, my Mepis 11 install developed an old KDE bug where kworker randomly maxes out the CPU until the system is rebooted. So, last night kworker misbehaved yet again, I rebooted, and none of the partitions mounted other than root -- big problem considering /tmp, /home, and all customization stuff (icons, fonts, wallpaper, color schemes, etc.) are on separate partitions.

Fought with it, then reinstalled M11. This time, root could manually mount them from the console, but users were refused because the drive/partition *is* listed in fstab. Another reinstall produced a setup where, thanks to a wonky Mepis script, fstab was reset every boot to a default mounting all partitions (other than /) at /mnt/sd*#, and users still couldn't mount.

So, I reinstalled it again, and all fstab lines with /dev/[part] or LABEL were ignored (and of course, that's what I'd lazily used). I just booted a live session and re-edited the damned fstab to use UUID, so now I get to reboot yet again and see if that helped.

If it fails, well fuck it -- I'll install Mepis 12 beta and find out what *that* does to my system. Of course, this means dealing with GRUB2, aka the Metro/GNOME3 of system booting... *shudder* (If you're wondering why I'm not just installing 12B, it's because it's missing a number of KDE things I'd miss and, of course, uses GRUB2.)