The Time Sink

The good news about all the cleaning and such is that I found quite a few project parts that have been 'lost' in boxes or scattered hither and yon from various inside cleaning projects (which often entails just boxing 'stuff' up and putting it in the garage).

Now I'm in decent shape to be able to work on a couple of computer projects as well as a few outside things that I need to do now that it looks like the rains are gone.

Under "Headlines you really don't want to follow" I submit:

CNN handled it with a little less sensationalism...

I'm easily confused on a good day, but... Let's see; the temperature Saturday hit 98 and nearly that on Sunday. "They" were calling for 75 by Friday, but they've moved that one up to tomorrow. ...and they're saying 65 on Friday (with a slight chance of rain).

Hmmm... I thought I lost a day. Maybe I didn't. ...or maybe it just doesn't matter? In any case, this post is being written in Quanta on the latest incarnation of Tux, the venerable Athlon Shuttle that's been redone annually since forever.

Yep, Quanta, because it seems to be more along the lines of EditPlus, the HTML editor I use on the Windows boxes. ...and on this box because it's now running Ubuntu 7.04, and I want to get it stable so I can take down the 64 bit box and run the 64 bit version of this distro on it.

...so I can take down the 64 bit box and run the 64 bit version of this distro on it.

Yep, that's what I did. ...only not without stumbling once, but what a grand stumble it was!

In other news, we went to see Spiderman 3 this evening and then out to dinner in honor of Brad's birthday the other week. Yep, a few weeks late, but no one is sick, we're not putting any cats down and his friends could come along.

So, since you upgrade incrementally you take it step by step, from 6.06 to 6.1 and thence to 7.04, right? ...but I'd forgotten that the reason I'd loaded 6.06 on this box was because 6.1 got hung up during the boot process: something was locking up the script. ...so when I went for the incremental upgrade, things just went swimmingly, right up until the reboot and then the script hung in the same place as with the live CD. Oh, gee, darn...

Major angst. Kinda'. I had the old Shuttle set up for web browsing and email, HTML editing and posting, basic photo work and ftp; I wasn't in extremis by any means. ...plus the main Windows box and the media box were available (gag). ...and the laptop is still chugging along nicely on 6.06, so yeah, why not?

No, I didn't install it just yet: I used the live CD to pull the home directory off to a portable HDD and then verified those files were intact on the Ubuntu Shuttle. Then I told the CD to make itself at home and blow away everything on the Pavilion.

Things trundled along just fine; the biggest change in 7.04 on this box is that the distro didn't get a good read on the video card and the monitor (7.04 on the Shuttle nailed it just fine). There's a troubleshooting page on the forums that dialed the problem in rather nicely, but the real fix was letting Automatix take a look at the Nvidia driver chipset and do its install...

So, I have the 'day to day' box upgraded and running well. ...and the 'bleeding edge' box is ready to take on some more challenges. Both Windows boxes are humming along (no, I'm not sure what tune exactly). The iMac is still running interference for me with the routers and such. ...and there's a debian machine waiting for the installation of some home control software.

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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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