2015 — 6 April: Monday

Finally!1 But happy Easter Monday anyway...

Yet another...

... successful re-re-installation. That's the Good News. The Bad News is that this time I actually had a hardware error. On my system SSD. Slap bang in the middle of my main Linux system partition. On the other hand, the other (minor) piece of Good News, I suppose, is I'm becoming really quite experienced at installing Linux systems. Whether one of them will ever stay healthy enough for long enough for me to do anything except (seemingly endlessly) the re-installing of Linux systems remains to be seen.

What went wrong this time, David? :-)

I shall be...

... chucking out the failed SSD if that's a clue. There was a buffer I/O error on it (after previous detection of an I/O error to a superblock on it). I gather this is some deep bit of the file system and not something I fancy trying to work around. The symptoms (I belatedly realise) extended to the sluggishness of the booting this morning, the disappearance of bits of my running desktop "right before my very eyes", a re-boot that led to undecipherable text in the file manager when I got my desktop back, followed immediately by a collapse into a full-screen terminal warning me (with its dying breath, I guess) about the errors.

This SSD was the smallest one (240 GB) and, in its previous Windows life, had spent its time having Windows File History entries written to it. That could, I suppose, explain why it's a bit clapped out. Or I'm just jinxed. But I really can't blame Linux for hardware troubles, can I? It's a good job this week's composer is Chopin, as I find Chopin very soothing.

It helps while I'm Chopin and changing my system :-)

Philosophical ruminations...

... on my tendency to do Silly Things. I shall now take a few minutes to add a choice item or two to this ever-growing (Linux-related) list. But I have to say, today's fatal little error2 won't ever be recurring. It's 17:20 and yet again, I have a completely new, freshly-installed, Linux Mint 17.1 Xfce 4.12 twin-monitor system. I'd like to think of this one as my Best So Far... but I admit my track record of keeping these things up and running for long enough to make such a judgement is far from perfect. Basically appalling, in fact. And getting worse as each day passes, it seems.

Chaps need hobbies. I never thought mine would be crashing robust modern operating systems. (Though I do have a history extending back as far as 1976 in ICL's mainframe-stuffed DPMR in Bracknell.)

Here's proof...

... that my scanner is all present and correct. Again. I suspect Trudeau's latest tranche of cartoon Life in the Trenches will be trenchant, as ever, but it's in an excellent cause:

Latest Trudeau

Some time later...

... the only thing I've yet to get running again is my lighttpd local webserver. And I haven't a clue what's awry this time.

The face-reddening BIOS-related mistake I made, by the way, was to completely forget the need to reset the correct boot order after going to all the trouble (5 minutes) of a fresh installation. So after what seemed like a perfectly good installation I was actually still running my "old" — if yesterday classes as "old" in this context — Linux off the old (and "iffy") 240 GB SSD. All the while foolishly thinking I was running my fresh one. Clues that the idiot now typing managed to miss this time included the fact that there hadn't been any updates to add immediately after installation. And, even more tellingly, several applications I'd added yesterday were already present on this "fresh" system.

The new installation was, indeed, perfect. It was just sitting unused on an entirely different SSD from the one I thought I'd just booted from!

There are times in this life, it seems, when one believes what one wants to believe... regardless of the underlying reality. That's what one's Linux guru chums help correct, of course. Though I pride myself that I've added several interesting pieces of aberrant system behaviour to Len's list. Time, I suspect, for an evening meal and a change of activity.

My 4K screen...

... is once again back in use, though until I can persuade my Radeon graphics card to behave (and thus gain access to its DisplayPort 1.2 output) I'm still restricted to a 30Hz refresh rate via HDMI. That's adequate for 99% of the things I do, so I can easily tolerate it. Meanwhile, I appreciate the increased screen real estate.

  

Footnotes

1  By which I mean, it's already past noon, has already been a fairly fraught (albeit gloriously sunny) day, and I have a working Linux system. Again...
2  BIOS-related, just for a change, but oh-so-very-far-reaching in its effects :-)