How to Kill Your Ubuntu: Impatience!

Okay.

I was impatient.

I killed my Ubuntu system.

How?

Despite what I said in a previous post, despite all the warnings, I was anxious and impatient and I went and installed the Release Candidate of Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy last night. I couldn’t wait 5 days for the final release. Stupid me.

Now I can’t load X and my cordless keyboard from my keyboard/mouse combo is not working in CLI (command line interface). It’s rendered useless (without a degree in Linux-ism! <grin>). Although I haven’t really looked into it… I don’t know if I really want to. There were a lot of errors during the upgrade so, I don’t want to spend the rest of 2006 fixing it! I wish I could just type in: $ sudo fix-it –now

Of course, in my impatience, I didn’t really back up anything. Now I have to figure out how to access my Linux partition (either from Windows XP or a Live CD) and copy what I want to keep to my Data partition (FAT32).

There’s not much to backup. I’d like to keep my Thunderbird emails and settings, though… oh, and possibly my Amarok settings and data. There’s some music, pictures, and videos I’d also like to move. As for other Ubuntu-specific configs or software, that’s not really important.

BUT, there is a couple positive things to this (believe it or not)…

First, my Ubuntu is my first-time Ubuntu installation and has been installed since April (I think?). Since then, there’s been a lot of tinkering, customizing, testing, updating, re-tinkering, etc, that my system has gained a lot of peculiarities and issues that I can’t get rid of… like my issue with transparent panels killing my x-server and crashing Ubuntu. Re-doing my system will allow me to start over from scratch with a brand new system. I know my way around it now and I know what I want, what I don’t need to try, and what not to do (like install a RC on top of a highly tinkered system — shut up, I know now!).

Second, with a new Ubuntu version from scratch, it will give me more material to write for my blog! I plan on documenting most of my experiences, issues, and reviews. Hopefully, it will help the newbies experiencing fear, uncertainty, and doubt about using Linux.

Wish me luck!