Under a Gibbous Moon

Yesterday, after installing the latest upgrades to Ubuntu, I restarted the computer only to find that the file system was completely borked. After using a LiveCd to repair that, I found that Gnome was hopelessly corrupted leaving me playing around with the command line.

So, once again I go back to the LiveCD and attempt to mount my personal directory. Now I encrypt my personal directory using ecryptfs (this being conviently built into Ubuntu for the last couple of versions). I went to mount it and no dice. I had the passphrase and the files all went back to the right places but they did not decrypt.

Another setback, but OK. I go back into the command line and mount my external storage, but no, it, for some reason does not want to mount sdb1 due to and I/O error. Odd since it mounted fine on the LiveCD. Now I have to track down a Windows version to do a file system check on the drive, since it is NTFS. Luckily, my wife still dual boots Windows and Ubuntu. There were some errors with the file system and now repaired, I go back to the command line.

It mounts but that’s about it. I try to back up my files and it gets half way through and tells me that there is an I/O error and sdb1 is unmounted. Finally flumoxed, I use the LiveCD to make sure that at least the most critical files have been saved and I wipe the system.

Since I’m doing a fresh install, I figure that I’ll try something different. I’ve heard some things about Mint so I figured that I’d give that a try. Mint is an off shoot of Ubuntu (as Ubuntu is an offshoot of Debian). As far as I can tell the biggest difference is that Mint eschews “pure” open source in favor of usability. Basically, this means that it runs Flash and DVDs and MP3 right out of the box without installing the restricted extras packages in Ubuntu. Other than that, I haven’t found that there is too much of a difference.

So basically, Ubuntu destroyed my system and so I took my ball and went crying to a different flavor of Ubuntu. It’s not a codependency issue, is it?

In honor of Earth Day, I present someone who is doing their utmost to keep garbage out of our landfills.