Fair warning there is a lot of Linux geek talk in this one
I am not only a Linux user I am an advocate, an open source evangelist,
and a true fan. I think Linux on the desktop is great and I love being able to
use my computer on my terms in ways that the other choices don’t allow me too.
I love being able to tinker, and I even enjoy troubleshooting the odd quirk
that can (and does) pop up from time to time. I even know a fair amount, and savvy
in the terminal, and can generally get everything I want to get done
accomplished.
I also know enough to really get lost in the woods; as such
I just spent 4 days trying to fix my box. It started when my curiosity over
this whole bitcoin phenomenon finally won out over my better sense, and I
decided to try installing a bitcoin mining application. Even though I knew the
application was going to use the graphics processor in the system I for some
reason didn’t think about what that would do to my system (which was using the proprietary
driver for better performance). What I didn’t know is that it was going to hijack
all but one of the GPU cores available, and make it impossible to undo what I
had done. Somewhere in the process of trying to get my system back to normal I
managed to break the system, and so I decided to do a fresh install.
Ubuntu is my distro of choice, it works well out of the box
and has a comfortable interface, but to change things up I chose to go with
Fedora 20 since I was installing fresh, which looked nice but was slow for no
reason on my system where Ubuntu ran much better also getting steam to run was
turning into a pain, so I chose to return to ubuntu. I downloaded the 13.10 ISO
and attempted to install which appeared to be working fine right up to the
point where I told it to use the whole drive, then I got a warning box full of
question marks….not helpful.
I re-downloaded the ISO, I burned a new disk, I used three
different flash drives, I tried installing the gnome and KDE variants and none
of them seemed to be working, so I decided to take the long way and downloaded
12.04 (the current long term support version), which installed….but failed to
install the bootloader. I tried twice before I decided to install Grub manually
which did work (ah ha! Progress) .
This worked right up to the point where the OS decided it
wanted the dvd in the /media/ directory, the problem is my DVD drive is USB and
not located in that directory, I downloaded the ISO again and used loop mount
to mount the image to the directory which worked! A ha we made it to 12.10, now
to 13.04, however now it wants that disk in the drive, and now it won’t see the
ISO mounted to the drive, I located the upgrade config file and gave it the
path of my DVD drive and upgrade after the upgrade to 13.04 I logged in and…..black
screen with my mouse cursor and nothing else. I was able to get the TTY
interface up where I reinstalled Unity, rebooted and logged in and….desktop
wall paper with a mouse cursor. Restarted unity reboot and we are in business. At
some point I had installed the driver for GPU using the utility in ubnutu but I wanted the proprietary driver back on
the box so before I upgraded to 13.10 I downloaded and tried to install the
driver. The system told me that I needed to remove the previous version first.
Now one of the things I like about Linux is that I can make
it do what I want, I can also make it do what I want without talking back to me
about it. And so I reissued the install command with “–force” and installed the
driver, rebooted and.....when I tried to login in would bounce me back to the
login page. I jumped back to tty logged in started x and tried to fix it and
rebooted, and I had broken the boot loader.
Needless to say my adventures in Linux-land this weekend
were not too fun, I finally got a terminal installer and installed the system
with no issues, it is sitting vanilla box right now waiting for me to finish
the set up.
The takeaway on this one for me is this, just because you
know what your doing doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look before you leap. also get
a good image pulled together so next time I don’t have to go through this whole
mess.
-ITbrewer
You best back the F:\ up son.
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