On Saturday 15 January 2005 10:45, you wrote:
> I'm running Slackware 10.0 and KDE 3.2.3. I had stuff set up the way I like
> it, and little by little things seem to be breaking. I've noticed this
> before, and it's almost like I need to do a fresh install to get everything
> working again. I'm waiting for 10.1 to come out before I do another
> install.
>

How strange!  I must admit I haven't used Slackware in years, but software 
rot is something I associate only with MS systems.  I have had some 
occasional trouble with my notebook (RH 7.3) probably due to frequent 
reboots; a while ago the sound stopped working with I think was due to a 
corrupted device file.  (I know the hardware is OK because it still works 
when I boot it into Windows.)   Do you reboot or turn your system off 
frequently?  My two Linux tower systems are pretty much left on all the time, 
and I don't have trouble unless I've done substantial monkeying with the 
libraries.  (That would be a good topic for a talk sometime - what are the 
rules for  compatibility of different library versions, etc., etc.)

> For instance, I used to be able to play music CD's from the CD-ROM drive,
> either by pressing the play button on the drive or using the KDE CD player
> or XMMS. I can't do that anymore. It doesn't "see" /dev/hdd anymore. It
> used to work, then a few months ago it got all glitchy. I managed to
> reconfigure things somehow in the CD player app and it worked, but now it's
> failed again. Any apps I try to use generally lock up while searching for
> the drive. If it finds the disc at all, it plays for one second then stops.
>
> When I press the play button on the drive itself, it revs up then slacks
> off, over and over. It used to work, now it doesn't. I haven't changed
> anything in /etc/fstab, or anything else that I know of. I know the drive
> is good because I use it for ripping stuff to my harddrive all the time.
>

That's strange too.  The only time I've had intermittent trouble with CD or 
DVD drives is when they're on the verge of going bad.

> Another example is SMTP in Kmail. It will work fine for months, then
> suddenly I can't send mail from tigerflag.com, and neither can my husband
> in his user account. I get an error message that it can't find the account.
> This happened a few months ago. At one point I rebooted the computer and
> things were fine again. When it happened yesterday, I finally toggled the
> default account to intergate.com (I use two accounts: smtp.intergate.com
> and smtp.tigerflag.com) and it started working again for _both_ accounts.
> It was like something got jammed, and once I successfully sent from
> intergate.com, then tigerflag.com worked again. It doesn't make any sense!
>

Can you still browse the web when this happens?  

> While I'd appreciate any suggestions for fixing the CD problem, I'm
> actually more interested in why my setup seems to be deteriorating over
> time.
>
> TIA,
> Siri Amrit

Sorry I can't offer much in the way of advice, but hopefully someone else 
will have a different perspective.  Good luck!

Vaughn

>
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