LeeBing's Corner

Short note for those that are interested in Asterisk, the recent episode number 38 of FLOSS Weekly features an interview with the original creator Mark Spencer.  I was surprised to find out that he was the one that started Gaim (now Pidgin) instant messenger.

Sorry Ubuntu, but you are gone for a while from my life.  Why you ask?  Well if you must pry, there was a series of incidents that any one of them on their own perhaps could have been addressed and put behind us.  Unfortunately, the combination of events left me with not being able to boot Vista or Ubuntu either one.

As both of my readers know, I’ve been working a lot lately with Wine in efforts to perhaps make Ubuntu my permanent home and run the bare essentials via Wine.  Everything was pointing to the need for an older wine version 0.9.58 and being able to use Office2007 successfully for many people.  Since I was running Hardy (8.04), trying to install Wine 0.9.58 claimed to need an ldap2 package.  I installed what I could find via apt-get in hopes the current Hardy replacement for this package might be good enough, but no go.  I then went right back to my terminal to remove the unnecessary package I just added and using my up arrow pulled up the install command I had ran and simply replaced the word install with the word remove.

PANIC ATTACK!!! Suddenly scrolling down my screen apt was removing everything related to my Gnome-desktop including terminal, amarok, and many other packages scrolling by as I quickly got XKill launched to stop the terminal (sorry I didn’t know any other way, newbie here).  The damage was done.  I now started having problems trying to reinstall missing programs, probably due to other packages that I didn’t know were missing that needed replaced first.  After some time of trying to find missing items to replace I resolved to just reinstall Hardy.  Now it gets worse.

Upon the reinstall of Hardy, now Grub tells me it can’t mount the volume and that it can’t find my Vista partition to boot.  Not as drastic I realize if Vista had the same simple boot management as XP and previous Windows versions.  I could not get a reinstall of grub to work around the boot issues.

All of this would also be forgive, except that I already had to work the Saturday of the Memorial Day weekend and had take home assignments that I had to do Monday morning (all this happened Sunday evening).  Now I have spent most of Memorial Day reinstalling my Vista system and applications (good time for clean choice of just the apps I need).

The next use of Ubuntu will be dedicated to a separate computer as I have no interest in the future of killing two operating systems with one bad error.  Sorry, no glowing happy ending at this time.