Day Six

Posted on 14 Nov 2008 at 15:01

Ubuntu, you treacherous swine. After singing its praises yesterday, it's now stabbed me in the back. Halfway through installing automatic updates the entire machine locks up, leaving me no choice but to pull the plug.

After a nervy reboot, in which the screen flickers off and on uncertainly a few times, Ubuntu finally comes on. Unfortunately, OpenOffice's auto recover only brings back about half my unsaved work, which is okay because it's not like it's my livelihood or anything.

Even worse, all those shiny new effects I've been installing over the past few days have been disabled and it's being Fedora-like in its stubborn refusal to let me turn them back on. All the icons related to graphical options have stopped working entirely and a quick trip to the file manager informs me it can't open, and that I'll have to manually run the "sudo dpkg --configure -a" command in the terminal. I do as it says and, hey presto, my icons work again. Given the resolution has been reset to Teletubbies size I determine my graphics driver has gone down, so I reinstall it - which is thankfully as easy as clicking a box - and finally we're making progress.

After an hour or so, my desktop is back to normal, but I've lost a lot of work and time. If Vista pulled anything like this it'd be crucified, and the way I'm feeling, if there was a couple of planks of wood and a hammer to hand, Ubuntu might follow suit. We get along fine for the rest of the day, but some of the trust has gone.

Next: Day Seven

Back to "My life with Linux"

Author: Stuart Turton