Are we having fun yet?

I delivered my BVC copy-edit yesterday, which was the last of my deadline-dependent urgencies. So first thing this morning was obviously the right time to upgrade my Linux installation to the latest release of Ubuntu.

So I set that cheerfully in motion after the first cup of coffee, and wandered off to read a chapter of a book, and wandered back with fresh coffee just to see how everything was progressing -

- and you know what's coming, don't you?

Dunno if it's their software or my hardware, but the process had hung fatally, ten minutes into the most dangerous too-late-to-back-out-now part of the installation.

So I rebooted, and found everything so broken that none of the auto-repair systems could fix it.

So now I am doing that manually, via a terminal command-line. Which is kinda beyond my pay-grade, y'know? So I wandered through to see m'wife just now, and she smiled and said, "You're having fun, aren't you?"

Which, yeah. I kinda am. If an elevated heart-rate and a craving for more coffee counts as fun...

update to my last

So I am sitting here watching an endless list of unpacking packages scroll upward through a terminal window - and suddenly in mid-list there's a bit of plain English, that says "...this likely means your installation is broken. To make things work again, do..."

- and then it was gone, before I had ever a chance to read the rest of it.

I KNOW MY INSTALLATION IS BROKEN THAT'S WHY I'M DOING ALL THIS

...ahem. Sorry about the shouting. I will just let it get on with all the unpacking, and see what comes thereafter.

It's exciting, yes? Even if I end up wiping everything for a clean install. That would be even more exciting, and I would probably lose you all, but hope to find you again in futureweb.

In answer to my previous question: no, no fun at all

Aargh. I almost had it working there, I was almost confident - but something major is wrong here, I have very pretty Ubuntu wallpaper and a mouse pointer and nothing more: no icons, no files, no software. Nix.

I guess I'll play around some more, but I do strongly suspect that I'm looking at a full clean reinstall, with all the fun that that implies. Including losing all my emails, because I never have learned to back them up. (Fiction should be safe, it's backed up twice over in the cloud, but - yeah. Bye-bye, world...)

All may not yet be lost

To nobody's particular surprise, things being as they are, it may after all prove possible to recover my unbacked-up data, if not my actual Linux installation. Turns out that if you have two parallel Linux installs on the same hard drive, they can peek over each other's shoulders at each other's work. Whether they can actually copy same, I have yet to prove - but I am hopeful.

Due to previous idiocies, I did in fact have several installs of various iterations of Ubuntu on the desktop. One I have brought up from 10.04 to 12.04, and set as my default fallback position; I can work on that. Another I am currently advancing from 12.04 through various leapfrogs to 14.04, the iteration that failed; if I can make that work, then I should be able to move forward, and probably all I will have lost will have been the time it's eaten and the time it's yet to eat. And the frayed temper, and the coolth, and and and.

I am trying to look on it as a learning experience. Certainly I know a few things about Ubuntu now that I didn't know this morning. Tho' mostly it's just a reiteration of what I've always known, that I should've learned what I was doing properly when I started doing it, twelve or fifteen years ago. ('Twas what Geoff said, indeed: "Schedule time," he said, "and spend a hundred hours learning it." Needless to say, I nodded wisely and with good intent and did not do that. And have busked and frauded my way ever since, as I do with everything, hey ho.)

In other news - finally! - be it noted that Gardner Dozois has nice things to say about my first Mars story (including a variation on "I would have bought that") in the latest issue of Locus. I'd link to it, but it's not openly available online. I might prevail upon m'wife (who has the Locus sub in this household) to post a juicy line or two. Then I could link to that.