Ah, catastrophe
So I woke up this morning to an Ubuntu installation so badly broken it won't connect to the internet at all. And I had an earlier installation that was working, so I have been sourly upgrading that - and the upgrade has just stalled out halfway through, in a way that I think means that this installation too will be broken if I try to reboot it. And I am not geek enough to know what to do about this, because "just never reboot" is not exactly an option hereabouts.
This is where I think about invoking my long-term survival plan, in the form of a Whole New Machine. Starting fresh, starting clean is always so attractive when things get muddy and messy and tangled-up as badly as this one is. (It has four separate iterations of Linux on it, three of which don't work. Three about to become four, that is.) This one's four years old, after all, which used to be a decent lifespan for a PC back in the day. That day was twenty years ago, but hey: it's all about mindset, and mine is kinda calcified. But when I did upgrade I'd been meaning to buy a machine optimised for Ubuntu, rather than constantly fighting incompatible hardware; and that would mean delay, where I could just wander into Fry's this afternoon and buy something on the instant.
And, and, and. And I did not want to spend my weekend doing this, soddit. Any of this.
And now I am going to reboot this stalled install, and learn just how bad things are. I may be some time. This may be farewell. It's been fun, mostly...
[EtA: yup, totally fucked. I seem now to have no functional Linux on my desktop, or anywhere in my life. This update brought to you from Windows on the laptop. And the yard guys have just started up their machinery outside the windows, and I am in fact more miserable at this moment than it is actually possible to be, I am just sayin'.]
This is where I think about invoking my long-term survival plan, in the form of a Whole New Machine. Starting fresh, starting clean is always so attractive when things get muddy and messy and tangled-up as badly as this one is. (It has four separate iterations of Linux on it, three of which don't work. Three about to become four, that is.) This one's four years old, after all, which used to be a decent lifespan for a PC back in the day. That day was twenty years ago, but hey: it's all about mindset, and mine is kinda calcified. But when I did upgrade I'd been meaning to buy a machine optimised for Ubuntu, rather than constantly fighting incompatible hardware; and that would mean delay, where I could just wander into Fry's this afternoon and buy something on the instant.
And, and, and. And I did not want to spend my weekend doing this, soddit. Any of this.
And now I am going to reboot this stalled install, and learn just how bad things are. I may be some time. This may be farewell. It's been fun, mostly...
[EtA: yup, totally fucked. I seem now to have no functional Linux on my desktop, or anywhere in my life. This update brought to you from Windows on the laptop. And the yard guys have just started up their machinery outside the windows, and I am in fact more miserable at this moment than it is actually possible to be, I am just sayin'.]