This Geek

• Killing time while at work. Yay. At least it’s my “early” week, which means I can knock off at 2pm. #
• 22 Deg C at 06h30 this morning was not a good sign. It was 36 Deg C at 14h30 near home #

• My 5 year old daughter doesn’t like the fact that I’ve shaved my beard. But she loves me anyway. #

I’ve spent the last four days re-organising my blog. Changed the theme, added tags to posts - damn I’ve got a lot of drivel here… four years worth!  It’s been an interesting experience going back over my old posts, comparing what I was thinking back then to how things have turned out now.  Some of my thoughts were pretty naive, but then I’ll probably always think that when reading my old stuff.

It’s also interesting to see how my mind set has (or hasn’t) changed over the years, also considering that I have posted such cryptic crap that I have no clue now what I was on about back then.

I recently got into twitter, thanks to my big red-bearded friend. Using a plugin for the site, I have integrated the two systems - for no particular reason other than I can. If it wasn’t for Digsby, I probably wouldn’t bother with updating twitter at all anyway.

Off to BT Games to see if they have anything interesting…

Ahh! I’m busy adding tags to old posts on my blog, to discover the new plugin has flooded my twitter feed. ARGH! Thankfully there’s delete!

Weekend is here!

The server has been down for a day or two while we changed the distro. It was running an obsolete copy of Mandrake, and it was just not possible to update the thing any longer. In my travels, I have come to like the Ubuntu distro - and best of all, it’s based on Debian, so updating it to new releases is a breeze.

I’ve been running Ubuntu server on a machine at home for quite awhile, so I was reasonably familiar with it, hence my decision to get it running on this box. We tried to reload the box a couple of months ago, but we couldn’t get the Hardy Heron installer to recognise the hard disk in the machine sigh, so I eventually gave up when searching for solutions wasn’t too fruitful.

I recently saw a note that Ubuntu 8.10 RC1 was available, and since I was in the mood for some punishment, I thought we could give reloading another go with 8.10, falling back to Edgy Eft if we had the same installer issues. At least if I loaded a prior version of Ubuntu, I’d be able to upgrade to the latest release via some simple commands.

My brother, kind soul that he is, acted as the bum-in-seat, fingers-on-keyboard monkey for me, doing all the crappy stuff like downloading and burning the relevant .isos, and telling me what was happening on the screens via messenger.

We got excited when it appeared that the 8.10 Intrepid Ibex recognised the hard disk and partitioned it, however that was short lived when everything failed on first boot with a hard disk not found type error. Sigh.

So we successfully installed Edgy Eft. After updating it, and then doing the release upgrade to Hardy Heron, everything went pear-shaped when we rebooted. Same error that we got with 8.10. Argh. FAIL. Fortunately we could select the prior kernel and boot back into the system.

After a lot of reading and stuffing around with various supposed “fixes”, we were no closer to a solution. Even the fixes that solved apparently exactly the same issue for other people did not work for us. Most frustrating.

So we reloaded the box with Edgy Eft again, upgraded to Hardy Heron, although this time I changed the default boot to the old kernel. Screw you, kernel 2.6.24. I’ll continue to use 2.6.15 until the horrible bug in the Ubuntu 2.6.24+ kernels is fixed.