Oops, you’re read only.
The quest continues… Tonight while working from home firefox crashed. Firefox never crashes on this box. When I tried to start it again I got nothing. Time to revert to the terminal. Starting firefox now returns:
GConf Error: Adding client to server’s list failed, CORBA error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0
Could not set mode 0700 on private per-user gnome configuration directory `/home/firewire/.gnome2_private/’: Read-only file system
Read only? How did the filesystem suddenly become read only? After some more digging I found that it’s a trick ext3 pulls to try to protect itself. From dmsg:
[4671483.997000] EXT3-fs error (device hdb1): ext3_free_blocks_sb: bit already cleared for block 963080
[4671483.997000] Remounting filesystem read-only
I’m pecking this out from firefox in windows in vmware. Since vmware runs off of my second disk it’s still writable.
Well that’s what I get for using a salvaged drive from a 4 year old compaq. So now I’m stuck. I have a nice SATA disk with all my important info on it. The only problem is kubuntu won’t let me install from that disk without formatting it because it’s using reiserfs. I can go back to suse but that would be a step backwards. I am quite disappointed that kubuntu won’t let me install without formatting the disk. I’m open to suggestion for another distro to try or tricks to make (k)ubuntu work on my SATA disk. I was really starting to warm up to kubuntu too.
I was a big slackware user back in the day but I haven’t seen much movement from that project since the yellow lung granule. I would really like to stick with kubuntu for a while but it’s inability to install from an existing reiser parition is a deal breaker. Fedora has a nice usb stick install capability. I might give it a try. I’m going to sleep on it. I hope this box is still up in the morning 
April 13th, 2006 at 5:16 am
can it install from any kind of existing partition? Or just some problem with that type of FS? It seems kind of weak given how popular Reiser is on linux.
May 7th, 2006 at 11:16 am
You can insmod the reiser driver by hand but it still requires that you format the partition.