Gotta love the “Oh Crap” moments
Ξ January 6th, 2008 | → | ∇ General |
As I was sitting around Friday, reading my RSS feeds as they scrolled happily across the top of my browser and trying to figure out what the heck I could write about for Monday, I suddenly realize they were no longer scrolling.
Not only that, my entire system has frozen up.
So, here comes the first “Oh Crap” as I had several paragraphs of notes I was organizing (you would have loved it) and had not hit “save” in a few minutes.
This has been a randomly recurring issue for which no suitable explanation has been brought forward, kinda like not knowing whether aliens really did give Bush an anal probe (it would explain a lot of things).
So after uttering a few more choice adjectives, I hit the reset and go to grab a beer while I wait for the reboot.
Everything comes back just fine and I resume my reading and “Oh Crap”…froze again.
I will interject here, I love my operating system (Kubuntu Linux) and would not switch for anything, but this was getting annoying.
So, to paraphrase Disney, “Hi Ho, ho hi, off to the forums I go”.
The popular theory seemed to be an issue with my video card (an Nvidia) due to the fact that Nvidia has not fully released an open source version of their drivers.
Ok, makes sense to me so I perform the recommended procedures for updating my video drivers. All goes smoothly and no anal probes are required.
Reboot and things are running along just peachy then suddenly “Oh Crap”..froze again.
I being to see pattern here:
Freeze, reboot, recover lost work, freeze, reboot, grab beer, cuss a lot. Repeat.
I finally figure out the problem has nothing to do with my video, it is one of those hidden, “doesn’t affect anyone but you” problems and I’ll need to upgrade the kernel for my system.
Side note: A “kernel” is the core part of any operating system. Even Microsoft has a kernel, but it has anal probing as a requirement so it should be avoided unless you are into that kind of thing.
So, download the script to do my update, reboot, and “HOLY @#%”, I can longer boot into my desktop (I can get into the command line interface, which does me absolutely NO good since I can’t access the forum post which has the “If this hoses your system” entry).
One of the main things I love about using Linux is it allows me to put all of my personal stuff in a hard drive partition which is separate from my operating system.
So a quick reboot, insert a CD, and I’m back in business with a nice, freshly re-installed operating system in under 30 minutes with all my information intact and no anal probes.
Long story short (too late, I know), I finally upgraded to the latest version of Kubuntu (Hardy Heron), installed the latest video drivers and so far, all seems well with the world.
No system freezes and still no anal probes.
As an side, this was NOT typical. It was just one of those things which affects certain system configurations. As a whole, Ubuntu has always been reliable.
The upside to all of this is I discovered some really neat features I never knew I had access to, drank more than a few beers, and found some new software.
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