So there you have it: Got back home tonight, booted up Mageia and... no kernel. Unbelievable, but probably related to the usual (this morning, before work) trouble making sure that an import from China (through Gmarket, which is now basically Ebay, and suffers as a result) had the correct import code (i.e., I was distracted) while I was also updating the kernel and a few other bits on my main boxen...

This morning I woke up, in fact, too early in the morning (after all, I don't start work until the afternoon) with a streaming cold, so it's hardly surprising that I was unable to concentrate... but... the beauty of Mageia (an offshoot of Mandrake/Mandriva) is that it retains basically the same style of installation media: download the minimal *.iso system (about 90Mb) and cut it to a CD to create the netinstall medium; insert it into the CD/DVD drive then reboot into the installation routine, set it to "update" rather than "install", and lo! and behold! - remove netinstall CD, reboot and boom! - you are back in your system, with an updated kernel. So easy!

Takes about 30 minutes max., and completely painless. Mind you, between a streaming cold and the fatigue of a too-long first working day of the week, it took me a while to recall what I had to do, but I did it, I had already set everything up when the system was installed and I could do it all myself.

When I recall the suffering I had on a weekly basis with Win3.11, Linux fills me with odd lumps of joy. I kid you not!