[GRLUG] Broken Video Drivers / I'm a PC

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Mon, 2008-09-22 at 15:15 -0400, Ben DeMott wrote:
> So the other day Fedora prompted me that their were 7 security
> updates.  Fedora lacks a much needed mechanism to force it to ignore
> certain updates permanently, so I usually update just to pacify the
> update warnings (what a Windows thing to do).

service yum-updatesd stop
chkconfig yum-updatesd off

then it won't check for updates automatically anymore.  I do this on all
my CentOS boxes;  also means one less running process, although that
doesn't mean much of anything on a modern box.

Then you check for and run updates manually at an appropriate time.

> One of the security updates (no idea which one) broke my video driver,
> which I didn't realize right away but became apparent when hardware
> accelerated programs wouldn't start.
> What things can break a video driver - besides updating your kernel?

Any update to X can break a video driver,  I'd figure updating X is more
likely to break X then updating a kernel. :)

> How can I attempt to prevent this in the future?

Perform updates piece-meal manually so if something breaks you know what
to revert.

> We need a new word for PC that is disambiguous to Microsoft - any ideas?

There is one: "workstation".  That is how most beards refer to any desktop running UNIX or a UNIX-like.