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Reboot

My Halloween was good; thanks for asking. I went to my friend Andrea’s to watch the football game with her and some of her friends, and we hung out for a good while afterward. No one yelled at me for not wearing a costume! Now that’s what I call a good time.

I upgraded to the new version of Ubuntu on Sunday. I’m always a little wary of upgrading because there’s the possibility that something could go wrong and screw up your system. It never happens to me, though.

Well, it never did until this time.

To finish the installation, I rebooted. During the boot process, a certain daemon was being turned on and off in an infinite loop, and I had to kill the power to turn off the machine. I was able to get to a root terminal with networking in safe mode, and I made it to the login screen by booting with an older kernel, but I didn’t want to go farther than that.

I used an old live CD to get on the Internet and ask the Ubuntu Forums people (and anyone who saw my status on Facebook) for help. Ultimately, I decided to reinstall Ubuntu; I didn’t think I could diagnose the problem, and this would have been my fifth successful upgrade in a row, which any sensible person would tell you is too many.

So, I downloaded and burned a CD from the command line and then reinstalled Ubuntu from that. Next, I spent six hours trying to restore from a backup I had made the day before (back up regularly, and always before upgrading!). For six hours, tar was dominating my CPU without extracting anything from the archive I had made. It turned out that I had an option wrong. The main argument that tar takes isn’t the directory where you want the archive extracted; it’s the file(s) you want from the archive. Doesn’t explain why it would take so long to extract /, which wasn’t even in there, though.

Since I had backed up my home folder, all of my personal files and most of my settings remained intact, so it was a relatively painless process getting back up to speed. Now it’s almost like I had upgraded, except that I’m enjoying the benefits of a clean installation. This new version has some minor annoyances, but it’s a lot quicker to boot up (and shut down), and the new default icon theme is pretty slick.

Overall, I am pretty pleased. I just don’t want it to happen again. To that end, I created a separate /home partition during the installation. That means I’ll be able to do a clean install in the future without having to restore my home folder.

From Wired: Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine.

Hot dogs come in packs of 10, while hot dog buns come in packs of 8. Some guy got fed up with that decided to take matters into his own hands. (Via J-Walk Blog)