Hi,
I managed to crash my Kubuntu 8.04... I know it was my fault, but everything started with the news that nVidia did release a new driver (177.80) for Linux which is suppose to fix several problems with plasma under KDE4.x.
So I downloaded the driver and followed their instructions to install it. The installer did build it's own kernel module and reported to have installed everything successful. It even updated the xorg.conf file and still didn't report a problem.
Then after reboot, the x server crashed reporting that the kernel module was not matching the driver version. Hmm... what should I do now?
So I rebooted into safe mode and did let the recover tool fix my xorg. It did install the opensource nv driver and so the X session was able to start - very slow however.
So I tried to install the nVidia driver again - no success either, even so strange enough a different version of the kernel modules was reported. At this point I should have stepped back and reinstall the driver from Kubuntu... but I thought, well maybe it is a good time to upgrade to the beta of Kubuntu 8.10... ups... that was a very very bad idea.
I launched the dist-upgrade utility as described on the Kubuntu homepage, the upgrade tool did succeed in all steps including downloading the new packages. Then the installation of the packages started. At some point I got an error that the setup tool wasn't able to upgrade the libc6 library. Oh boy!! From then on errors all over the place. In the end the upgrade failed, and my system was in bad shape - at least for me - not to recover. Thank god, the bash was still working. I was able to make a backup of all of my files and projects, saved them on my USB drive and after a few hours of work, I finally started to rebuild my 8.04 Kubuntu system.
Now I'm back up and running, but lost more than a work day. Oh man... why did I have to tinker with the nVidia driver, and even why can't I wait for the final Kubuntu release?
Well - lesson's learned... never touch a running system ;-)
