Linux 2.6 SUX!

First, I know that I should STFU because I'm not going to write a patch to fix it but I can't as I'm not a kernel developer and the knowledge I have about the kernel development is the same as the knowledge I have about T.V internals ;-)

Really 2.6 is annoying, I don't know what's wrong with Linus. Yes thanks Linus for releasing Linux as a GPL'ed kernel and for working on it but you still suck :-)

A few days ago I went to the office, Powered on my laptop, startx and errrrrrr. I'm not allowed to startx. WTF ?

After digging around for some times I discovered that the Xwrapper.config file has been replaced by a strange file, I discovered later that it was the fonts.dtd file from the fontconfig package. WTF !!

Simply, I fixed the file and managed to startx, Something wrong with the colors ? I finally discovered that the rgb.txt file has been truncated. I also discovered that a lot of directories has been turned into files. I was sure that someone didn't crack my laptop. After I fixed this, I was trying to switch my keyboard layout to Arabic but it didn't work. Open a terminal and damn! "setxkbmap" is crashing, Google told me that some files might be missing. I reinstalled the relevant debian packages and it worked.

I had to stop and consider it, Is it a file system corruption ? I never had this with Linux before. I rebooted using a live CD, Ran fsck but it was fine. Odd!

I booted my normal system back and started to work, I'm a full time employee after all and this suck when you want to poke around :-)

Never mind, I'll have a detailed look later.

I was doing something when I suddenly got a message on the terminal and the file system was remounted read only by the kernel.

Enough is enough, The night before I installed the 2.6.15 kernel from sid. Now I can say that it might be a corruption in the kernel data structures. I rebooted and fsck again, shit I never had any entries in my lost+found directory since I swotched to linux, Now I have something like 22 Megabytes.

That's it, I downgraded the kernel to the 2.6.15 from testing, kept rebooting and running fsck until it stopped reporting filesystem errors.

Now what ? I'm not going to reinstall ? Sure no.

I need to verify all the packages, I found debsums but I also discovered that not all the packages install an md5sum for their contents.

At that point I decided to go home.

I used debsums to verify all the packages with md5sumsand reinstalled all the packages with corrupted or missing files. I then reinstalled all the packages without md5sums for 2 reasons:
1) I can't tell whether they contain corrupted files or not.
2) To allow debsums to generate md5sums for them.

Now the only problem is that the md5sums files might be corrupted too but I decided that I'm still lucky ;-)

Everything was fine but I was really considering FreeBSD but then I thought about it again, I can't use it without trying to contribute but I don't like to contribute to a code under the BSD license which can be closed anytime.

Also, I won't be using stable, I'll be using release which is equivalent to Debian testing, It's also my fault that I used a kernel from unstable but come on, That's Linux, We are not talking about windows here. I mean even so, It should be stable.

Sure I wish I can report this as a bug but how ? I don't have any information to report.

The other problem is: How the hell am I supposed to use such a kernel when it enters testing ?

I can't also compile from source again for 2 reasons:
1) I've been building from source since the late 2.2, I tried building 2.6.15 some time ago but damn, mutt wasn't able to open my main inbos, grep complained about inability to allocate memory when I tried to grep through the ~500 MB file. Something is wrong and this makes me afraid.

2) If such a bug is there when we have a team of people maintaining the Debian package, How can I be sure that I won't hit something more sever when I'm on my own ?

I know that everything can have bugs but the filesystem driver ? Isn't this too much ??