I have been experiencing quite a lot of instability lately that seemed
to start as soon as I upgraded to kernel-2.6.15-1.1830_FC4. There was a
quick bump to kernel-2.6.15-1.1831_FC4 so I am assuming that there was
something wrong with the 1830 build. I hate to automatically blame the
kernel so I seek some guidance from those more knowledgable to try to
narrow down where my problem is if not there.
Some of the symptoms that showed up at the same time as I upgraded to 1830:
- when X started to show the login screen, it would show a blank gray
screen instead. It took a ctrl_alt_backspace to restart X and properly
display the login. Somewhere along the way, without me making any
changes other than yum updates, the login screen no longer requires the
X restart to come up.
- I am getting the following error spewing many times on boot up:
modprobe: WARNING: Failed to open included config file /etc/modprobe.conf.dist: No such file or directory
I don't know if this is just informational (i.e. not harmful) but it is
certainly unusual and Googling is not illuminating. My
modprobe.conf.dist seem to be in /etc/modprobe.d/ and I am not sure if
I can just make a symlink to repair things.
- sometimes when I stick in an audio CD in my CD drive, the audio
player or ripper seems to acknowledge that a CD is in there but fails
silently to play or rip it. Usually a reboot will fix this. This may
have started when I stuck in an old scratched CD to see if I could read
what was on it and the desktop locked up so I had to pull the power to
reboot to even get the CD out of the drive.
- when trying to move an icon around on my Gnome panel, the cursor
stuck into move-mode and the only way I could get it out was to push
the "Windows" button on my keyboard to pop up the menu. Even then it
would not move the launcher icon without getting stuck in that mode
again. A reboot fixed this.
Anyways, a lot of strange errors all of a sudden after a rock solid
experience for a long time before that and I am wondering what is going
on. I am starting to suspect some sort of hardware error but I can't
imagine what could cause that array of problems ... other than a wonky
kernel or some critical file that got clobbered when I have to force a
power cycle.
Just looking for some guidance from those in the know and if any of the latest updates caused anyone else strange grief.
Thanks in advance.
/Mike
