On Thursday I finally decided to start slowly moving my main development computer operating system from Suse Linux 8.0 to Debian Linux.
I did this because of several reasons:
- I somehow messed up with the Suse online update system. It seems, that every Suse-package somehow relies on older identifiers of itself being in the RPM-database. If ONLY the most recent version of a package is registered in the package database, it is not updateable anymore. And is the case with most of my Suse-packages.
- Debian has a very advanced package-system, APT, which makes it possible to up- and downgrade nearly every installed component without much efford. I've heard, that Debian is the only Linux-flavour, which can be upgraded from the earliest version of Debian to the most recent one without problems. With every other Linux-edition you somewhere have to do a complete re-install somewhere between different versions. Not so with Debian.
So I had to shrink my current Linux to make some room for the new OS. If anything would go wrong, I'd still be there with a running development machine.
At least I thought so...
To make it short: I totally messed up the prior installation. Suse is not usable anymore, it is impossible to log in, error here, error there, blah blah blah. I think I somewhere missed a re-check of the filesystem after resizing the partitions, and after running successfully Suse again for about 10 minutes, everything blew up. "Bye, bye, and don't mind, you can't login anymore ;)"
After having run this installation without (major) problems since I'm employed, not some strange error but nobody other than myself killed it. This had been the FIRST (and hopefully last) time, that something bad happened to existing data while I were installing a new OS.
Well, it is not all that bad. Debian is up and running without glitches and I still can access all my user-data from the Suse-partition. Strangely only system-files are affected by errors.
Ok, everything ok I thought, you lost your old system but the new system is running flawlessly. Just have to add more of our development-stuff and mount some of our common network-storages and I could be working again friday afternoon.
Once again I just thought so...
Then they turned my network down friday morning. And because I install/update all packages over network, you can guess how I continued with the recreation of my working machine. They did that because some other people messed with IP-addresses. Now every single IP in my subnet has to be registered and checked seperately by our admins. And this seems to take some time.
Time, in which I'm without network and almost inoperable at all. Damit. Time to surf around, read news and blog nonsense.
Oh, I almost forgot:
My favourite news-reader, FeedDemon, seems to have turned commercial. And the beta-versions are only functionally until a specific date. Damit again.
Today's "Hit the Bush"
You surely heard of Bush's thoughts of supporting missions to Moon and Mars. This is one of the very few things of Bush, I'm supporting too.
BUT, don't you think that he just took the chance of recent mars missions to turn the public interest away from:
- unsuccessfully trying to make peace in Iraq (recent helicopter attack)
- empowering intelligency agencies at the cost of human privacy (less privacy through Patriot Act 2)
- the increasing hole in USA's purse (U.S. Liabilities Report)
- and other stuff (Bush supports Saddam, comic)
And: Take a look at Bush in 30 seconds.