It used to be that I used Debian’s unstable tree (Sid–named after the “unstable” child from Toy Story) for my work machine and home machines. The only problem was that occasionally, when I would update to the latest and greatest packages, things would break and then it would take a bit of time and effort to get things back to working order. To some extent, this was actually fun and a good way to learn how things work. In general, I don’t learn how things work until I get over the fear of breaking something–play with it, break it, learn how to fix it, etc.

At some point in the last few years, it became less than fun to constantly have to learn how to fix things that were broken before I could get some work done, so I started using some of the more stable Linux distributions, like Mandrake, Fedora Core, and most recently (and still) OpenSuSE. This kept me still fairly up to date with the latest and greatest packages, but as long as you stick to the official release packages and cycle, you’re pretty safe from anomalies and having to fix random things when they break.

I forgot all that, apparently. I’ve been tracking the apt repositories for SuSE 10, and yesterday for some reason I cannot recall, I decided to “apt-get upgrade” (pull down all the latest packages). What fun! Actually, to be fair, only one thing really went wrong. When I rebooted this morning, X (the Graphical User Interface) was unable to start. So I ran “startx” manually. Back came the error something alone the lines of “unable to load ‘radeon’: module does not exist (0)”. Not very nice. Apparently what happened was that the driver (/usr/X11/lib/modules/drivers/radeon_drv.so in this case) was moved into a new package (xorg-x11-driver-video-6.9.0-3) and there was no dependency in apt for it to get installed.

Bummer. =:) So, a simple “sudo apt-get install xorg-x11-driver-video” later and I’m back up and running. Here’s hoping that this helps someone else who gets stuck with this. =:)

But it’s a good reminder, all the same, as to why it’s best to stick to the stable release packages and cycles of your favorite Linux distribution, boys and girls.

Okay, bye.