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May Emerges, Lynx eats my Dev System

01 May 2010

The Month of May

The glorious sun joins forces with waves of pollen this time of year. Yesterday I was laid low by the evil dust, and only compounded the issue by taking some no frills Nyquil (anti-histamine). Today my strategy is to just suck it up while walking, then Michelle and I will visit the arboretum, and finally I'll resurrect my development system after a problematic upgrade.

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Eats my Mouse

I was S...T...O...K...E...D about the new Ubuntu release for a few minor feature upgrades (pretty) but be careful if you have Nvidia 8800 GTX(s). First the upgrade appeared to take, but my old Logitech MX 518 mouse issues popped up (flakey functionality). I adjusted my xorg.conf file and the system died while booting. Couldn't get a terminal with Ctrl Alt F1, zilch, nada, nunka. Downloaded and burned the 10.04 iso and attempted a fresh install after losing a couple of deluded (no frills Nyquil) hours to fixing the system. Couldn't get a prompt unless I booted with a temporary Ubuntu 9.1 Karmic install, then poked around the drives. The 10.04 iso has video drivers which don't work with my cards (I think) since the screen goes loopy during the process very early on.

I keep important source in Dropbox, remote git repos, and email so I only lose a day or so of reinstalling tools, language installs, IDEs, updates etc. worst case, which still mightily SUCKs. This is one more day where I'd love an image of yesterday's system to clone or a super easy to install web based dev programming language. C'est la vie, play in the fire and expect to get burnt ;).

Some interesting facts about May if you're me.