My system is really fouled up now. Starting with the updates on Feb 18, it seems the whole thing is falling apart. Before that it ran like clockwork. First the pam-0.99.8.1-17 thing. Then the DVD burner quit working (just hangs when I hit the write to disk) and now nautilus won't start at all. Programs I wouldn't expect to crash, do so every time (scigraphica for example). Something went whacko today while talking to a client, the system became very very slow and unresponsive and since I had the client on the phone at the time, I just did a ctrl-alt-backspace and the problem seemed to fix itself, but I think I didn't look very good over that. ( This is a Q6600 w/3 gig. What can slow that down to a crawl? I didn't take time to look. ) Packages build wrong. Compiz insists on starting everytime I log in. You name it, it's happened in the past few days. yum check-update reports nothing. fontconfig won't build for --target=i386 (it did a week ago). I'm not griping, really. I've been a Redhat/fedora user since Redhat 4. (I played with RH2, but was a slackware user at the time) I just want a working linux system. I remember having to calculate mode lines from my monitor manual to get X running. But I'm starting to look around. I'm really nervous about this. I ran FC4 for a long long time and it was so stable. On quite a few systems. It's still running on my little home server. I need a stable dev system. I've been making a living developing Linux systems for over 12 years now and I can't get own F8 box to run smooth? That sure doesn't look good to clients. I've spent dozens of hours trying to heal this box and it just seems to be getting worse. It probably matters that this install was done as a clean F7 install which was live upgraded to F8 after about 2 weeks. SO I see 4 choices: 1) Do a clean install of F8, essentially start over (I have separate /, /boot, /opt, /home, and /usr/local partitions), 2) try and fix this (the pam thing _really_ makes me leary), 3) cross my fingers and hope it stays up 'til F9 comes out and hope that is better, 4) jump ship to some other distro. Knowing just how dangerous this is, I am asking for opinions. I've got a ton of code to write for a client and I seem to be spending hours mucking with system instead. I'm getting behind. I don't have time for this. Anxiety is taking it's toll. Grrrrrrrrrrr. Maybe KDE'll work better ........ Robert
