More fun with Kernel Panic

After an update session sometimes ago (and yes, I didn't need the computer for quite a while, that's why I can't really tell you the cause). I experienced a persistent fault: "Could not find /dev/disk/by-id/blablabla-part2 - Would you like to fall back on /dev/disk/by-id/blablablabla-part2 (Y/n)?"
Regardless of the answer Medea went to everlasting sleep, um, well, till the reset button was pressed.

Yay! Kernel panic!

It's really no reason to rejoice.
On Archimedes (a meticulously preserved SuSE 10.3) the Virtual Box update seemed to have trouble with the fact that there were apparently three kernel versions installed (no idea how they got there), so I decided to get rid of two of them with YaST. And so the catastrophe began…

openSuSE 11.1 on an Apple MacBook Pro

Meet polyhymnia, my new Apple MacBook Pro 13'' with standard processor and 2 GB RAM. For convenience, the first thing I did was exchanging the 160 GB harddrive against a 500 GB one. While installing MacOS X I already left 60 GB free for an openSuSE installation. If you want to install openSuSE as well and didn't do that, follow the hints on OpenSUSE.org.

Crackling USB sound card

Short note: My laptop's new USB sound card made annoying crackling noises at high CPU load (simple check: swipe mouse over buttons in task bar with full plasma desktop effects :-) ) . Apparently this is due to the USB bus not supplying enough power, because I got rid of this by using an externally powered hub.
Hm. Simple solution, but dire consequences: lugging around a fat hub and its power supply? Or get a Y adaptor (like this one) and let it block two of my precious USB ports? Not amused.

Oh, those sneaky Apple people…

…still trying valiantly to keep us from procrastinating. Apparently they now deny apple.com/trailers access to all non-Quicktime users, which is more or less the Linux community. Hey, and I always thought we stood all united against Microsoft.
Several workarounds have been proposed.