Well, since a second upgrade attempt left opensuse even weirder (dialogs with half the controls not working, firefox going from crashing every second load to every load, etc) it was time to nuke it again, but this time replace it with something different.
The question was, what?
It turns out that FreeBSD does not like my video setup (which is too bad, because I had 6 consoles open, and compiling a different part of the ports tree in each one, and there was no indication that it was under any sort of load, even though the load average was ~6).
Linux Mint? Tempting, very tempting ... but they're going off in 3 different directions right now.
Good old slakware? I downloaded the DVD (using knoppix, since the os was hosed), then went looking for updates ... apparently, the package browser is now someone else's problem .. and that page says that they're not doing it any more, and to come back when they've got their "new improved" whatever ... and slackware.com is down at the moment, so no linky for U!
So, what the heck - go grab Fedora 16 and install it ... then find out after doing the install and a couple of gigs of new packages and updates, that it hangs on reboot ...
I finally figured out the problem - for some reason it doesn't see my usb keyboard (plugged into my screens' usb hub) and it's waiting for a keyboard to appear ... so I have one of those rubber roll-up keyboards and a usb2ps2 adapter sitting on top of the box, out of harms way ... probably one of those "1 in a million" things - like having to unplug the second screen to get the initial install to work, then plug it in and when it reboots, dual screen goodness with no fuss, no muss. Using xrandr to dynamically set up the screens and dumping xorg.conf looks like a real winner.
The funny part - I've always found gnome to be kind of ugly, but the old 2.whatver gnome, the way they fixed it up is nice. I could get used to it ... (though I can't wait to see how lxde looks).
the evil part
SElinux. I removed it, and the machine is MUCH faster. so when they say it "only used ~7%" I'm not buying it.
In other good news, my colour laser FINALLY WORKS!!!!!! It was recognized, but no drivers - and this time the Samsung drivers installed with no hassles, so the only thing that still doesn't work is the scanner. I can always scan to usb (or maybe just make a patch cord and plug it right into the computer that way????)
One last speed-up ... no swap file, so there's a lot less time wasted managing fake ram (and more real ram available for running programs). It's not quite as fast as my dual-core lappy was, but for an 8-year-old ram-deficient box (only 2 gigs), it's still got lots of life left in it.
If you looked at my previous post, I tried to load it down, opening eclipse, openoffice, the gimp, playing mp3s in amarok, firefox and opera both open, web server, ftp server, mail and news servers running in the background ... and it still used less than a gig of ram.
Just goes to show that the real bottlenecks for everyday use are mostly self-inflicted "best practices" that aren't so great any more. If you want to try your machine w/o swap, but have the option of restoring it, just fdisk the drive and change the partition type from swap to anything else - no need to format it, since you won't be mounting it. If it runs okay, then you might want to reformat it and use it as a separate /tmp or whatever, and clean it on every reboot (note - do not do this until after you remove SElinux or you will be very sorry).