2015 — 12 March: Thursday
The countdown clock is ticking1 and there's some postponed foodie shopping to be done before my morning guest arrives with his executioner's axe (or do I mean his head stuffed full of arcana regarding RAID1 setup as the Linux boot derangement?) Actually, he asked me to make sure the Laptop PC is standing by just in case he needs to consult his colleague Mrs Google over some of the finer points of mdadm lore while a web browser is unavailable on BlackBeast Mark III.
The Laptop, it turns out, is still "only" on Mint 17. But it's all patched and ready. I will attend to its minor upgrade after BB Mk III is a happy bunny. Never a good idea to have only one working PC available at any given time. One day soon, I actually hope to be lugging the 40" 4K screen back in from its exile on the dining room table and soon thereafter enjoying a larger view of my digital life. Probably not in time to show it to Junior tomorrow, however.
Who knows?
At this rate, I may even get the scanner working again! [Pause] Shopping done, surprisingly busy traffic successfully traversed, car back on its nest. Time for brekkie. There's a plum to be zapped into a tasty but dentally deleterious cereal sludge topping. A washing m/c to be unloaded. Some high-pitched warbling on BBC Radio 3.
What a life, heh, Christa? Who woulda' thunk it? Not me. Now, where's that kettle?
I'd missed the discovery...
... of a thin strand of stars called the Monoceros Ring in 2002. But I shall try to remain calm in the face of the thought of my living in a galaxy that could be 50,000 light years bigger than "we thought". Not me, sunshine. I try never to think about the bigger picture in the run-up to a General Election or an OS re-installation. (Link.)
Although...
... we eventually managed to get the system booting off a 2x480GB SSD RAID1 array (kudos to Len) and (for a few heartening minutes) we were able to admire a gorgeous 4K desktop shown on the Philips screen... via the re-fitted nice new GTX970 graphics card... after he'd gone, and I popped the case back on and put the PC in its desired location... the next reboot (and several somewhat more frantic ones after that) all led inexorably to the conclusion that there's now a problem with the X-Server that draws the Mint desktop.
"Bother!" said Pooh. "I need some honey."
It's 19:00 and I'm going to attend to other things before I next try to navigate my way to various logs that may give people wiser than me an idea of what's gone awry. All I have is a giant terminal session window which tells me I can restart mdm (to get my desktop back) after I've repaired X-org server (or whatever). Deep unjoy.
As I said, a fantastic learning experience :-)
I don't know...
... which has been doing my head in more:
- Listening to Melvyn Bragg quizzing people on galaxies, dark matter, quantum weirdness, etc etc, or
- Rejoicing in my eventual success in getting the latest build of Mint 17.1 on BlackBeast Mark III to play nicely, to the extent that I'm now (as I was this morning) typing at a 27" screen in 2560x1440 resolution — an enormous improvement on the situation before my supper three hours ago, faced as I was with nuffin' but a giant terminal window.
Mind you, I did have to remove the GTX970 (again) and add 'nomodeset' in the grub loader, and restart several times along the bumpy road. But I wasn't running on a clean build on a RAID1 pair of 480 GB SSDs. The Philips 40" 4K screen is again sitting out this round on the dining room table. The graphics card is leering (sneering?) at me from atop the scanner.
And now, I see I'm being offered a security update to the painful piece of code:
Opinions vary on the wisdom of accepting Level 4 and Level 5 items. I think I shall pass. In fact, I think I'll call it a night. I have a lot of tidying up to do in Technology Towers before tomorrow evening's young visitors.