Everything was working well today. I took the laptop over to Panera Bread at lunch and got the wireless working there with a little script (the RH network config doesn't bring it up for some reason). Then I managed to squeeze in a little writing work on my book.

But tonight I made a big mistake. I added both the dag and atrpms repositories to my yum config and then installed mplayer and xine. Neither would play any dvd I inserted into the drive and the messages file was filled with problems with reading from drive b. I thought this might be due to the pci=noirq setting I'd added to the grub.conf file while searching for a way to get the ACPI stuff working so I could tell if my battery went dead or not. But once I rebooted without that kernel option I could no longer get back into my X session. It seems one of those repositories (ATrpms, I think) updated some X libraries. As far as I can tell, that's why this doesn't work anymore. X does come up in vesa mode, but not in the i915/i810 mode.

I then tried to do a “yum update” to see if I could clear it but that just showed some unmet dependencies. I couldn't tell if those were a result of the ATrpms installs or not, but no matter. I'm installing again. I need to make an rpm of my modified kernel first, but then I'll reinstall and put things right again. Fortunately, all the stuff I did this weekend is still in /home somewhere, which is a separate partition and will survive the reinstall. Then it's just a matter of following my own notes to get it all back up and running. Good thing I keep this blog, eh? :-)

*sigh* I should have known trying to use the DVD player would cause me grief. They always do. Now I wonder if I should bother with it anymore once I get the system reinstalled….