Moving up to eleven-ten

I surrendered this week. In my defense, I should have been writing, and updating my desktop machine to Ubuntu 11.10 was easier than writing. Writing, don't let anyone tell you differently, is terribly hard. Americans got to the moon faster and with less trouble than I'm having getting one goddamn paragraph to stick to the screen without begging to be put out of its misery like an incubating second-stringer in an Aliens sequel. I'd like to tell you this is what happens when you get remaindered pixels from an outlet store, but there's nobody to blame except my stupid, inferior brain.

Contrary to what you may have heard from the ancient Greeks, the Muses weren't a bunch of lovely young women plucking harps and brandishing scrolls, no. That may be how ancient Greek sculptors depicted them for the sake of not pissing them off, these lying sculptors may have been attempting flattery, I'm saying, but the real Muses are vicious, shrieking subhuman demons that latch onto a person's back and scream in the poor victim's ears and clawing at the victim's face from their perch behind. In spite of their gaunt frames, they weigh several hundred pounds apiece and their highly allergenic hair sheds more than a cat's as they whip it about trying to get strands into the prey's eyes, nose, throat, where the filaments lodge like spun fiberglass and eventually cause cancer of the soul. The bitches are tricksy, too; they'll do things like seemingly calm down for a bit and croon like doves as you write a particularly long and clever bit, only to laugh and howl like banshees when you get to the bottom of the page; worse still, they'll often grab your head again in their nine-inch-nailed paws and force your head up to look at the part they're shrieking at and force you to look at your own fecal slop, sometimes pushing your head to the screen as if they want to rub your nose in it.

Sorry. Where was I?



I surrendered, I said. This blog's faithful may recall a few months ago, when I made the upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10 UNE on the netbook and had reservations. By "reservations" I mean I sort of hated it. But later I upgraded the netbook to 11.04, and 11.04 seemed to markedly improve upon some of the issues. And then a couple of weeks ago, I updated the netbook to 11.10; although that's technically something of an interim version in Ubuntuland, 11.10 (I had to confess) was kind of awesome as far as how well Canonical had integrated everything together. Also, I have to confess with a poorly-defined sense of shame, I found myself adapting to working the way Unity (the Ubuntu user interface) wanted me to work over the way I was used to working. Sure, I didn't like the idea of everything being auto-maximized and having a global toolbar, but wasn't I already doing something similar on the main machine by maximizing applications myself and pushing them to different desktops so that Writer's Café was at home in one space while Firefox was in another and the open document in another and my music player in yet another? Didn't the global toolbar actually make a certain amount of sense and make it easy to find things a lot of the time? Wasn't that idiotic launcher pretty useful after you stopped cursing at it and grumbling at it and just used it? Isn't that some downright tasty Flavor Aid in my paper cup, here?

My desktop-replacing notebook's working environment had gotten long in the tooth, too. It had lots of little nooks and things that were so familiar they'd become contemptible, really. Lots of little apps that were never used or rarely used, lots of clutter here and there and a number of obsolete and unsupported applications that I just wasn't paying attention to. The irony being that I didn't much want to do a clean reinstall of the OS even though I have the drive partitioned to make that easy, still, doing the update would clean up the dross and shine some light on some of the dustier bits that needed junked. And as easy as it is to knock eye candy as being gratuitous--what really matters is functionality, right? and whether you can do the job you need to do with the tool at hand--I have to confess it's nice to have some shiny shiny chrome in your workspace.



So I enabled the updates in the update manager and updated from 10.04 to 10.10 to 11.04 to 11.10, because trying to go from a Ubuntu x.04 release to an x+y.10 release tends to be very bad; I learned that the hard way one time when I tried doing that a couple of years ago before discovering you weren't supposed to do that because it would do what happened to that installation, which is it broke just about everything and created a horribly disfigured, unstable system that hid out in the basement of an abandoned house and plotted gory revenge on the team of surgeons it blamed for its disfigurement. Well. Half of that happened, anyway. You can go, I think, from one Ubuntu x.04 to the x+1.04 release--this is upgrading a long-term-support version to the next long-term-support version, as they say in Ubuntuese, but it just seemed better given the age of the installation to take things incrementally.



Which, at any rate, mostly worked. Mostly. I found myself with an unstable 11.04 installation that wouldn't boot into the graphic interface, which was an interesting experience because I was actually able to solve this by plugging the machine directly into my Internet connection, getting into the terminal from the recovery mode boot menu option, and updating from the command line. Which I mention not because it's actually a big deal--this is something that any computer grognard has done, possibly in the midnight darkness during a category five hurricane with no power except what he could generate turning a hand-cranked generator with his scaly, hairy foot while improvising a network connection using the clipped end of a parallel port cable connected to the computer held in his teeth near the frayed end of a 120-year-old telegraph cable similarly held, his own tongue serving as a conductor/connector between the damaged wires. Fixing a broken update from the command line and proceeding as if it had never even happened wasn't anything special, and that's actually the point and the reason I'm mentioning it for the benefit of computer users who might be interested in Linux but find it intimidating or something: basically, any idiot who finds himself with a stalled and derailed Ubuntu upgrade has a good chance of fixing it if he can find is way to a terminal prompt by typing, "sudo apt-get upgrade" (no, don't let that throw you: think of it as magical gibberish, like "abracadabra" or "hocus-pocus" or "abacab"), whereupon the machine picks up where it was and finishes what it was doing. Actually, I had to do this twice, with the second upgrade attempt also needing to be aborted at one point near the end and the machine having to be told to update a few more odds and ends whereupon it rebooted exactly like it was supposed to and popped up the graphic interface and login prompt. It was very clever and I had to wonder if people upgrading their Windows have anything nearly as awesome as an upgrade process that fixes itself when there's a problem without the whole computer having to be thrown out a window, initiating a completely different kind of upgrade procedure that may require getting in a car and driving to Best Buy.

This is the kind of thing that has one hedging even though one wants to be gleeful and glib. Seriously. The whole general process of upgrading from Ubuntu 10.04 to 11.10 through two intervening versions was almost (but not quite) as easy as tripping over a stick and falling face-first into the ground despite the fact the process failed at least twice while I was doing it. This is marvelous, because while we all hope our upgrades go without hitches (and I've had massive operating system upgrades of similar scope go completely hitchless), the fact that failures were so easily recoverable is just magical. Which isn't to say that the Internet isn't full of people asking what they should do when a Ubuntu upgrade completely freezes their system like any other upgrade of any other operating system might for no particularly obvious reason. I'm just saying that Canonical has done a magnificent job of making at least some failures No Big Deal And Nothing To Get Excited About, which contributes to a particularly stress-free user experience and novice users shouldn't let themselves be intimidated. Kudos.



Of course, not everything has been smooth since successfully upgrading. This is, really, mostly my own damn fault and illustrates why clean re-installs really are better if you can bear it. I've had things like missing icons, for instance, and duplicate launcher entries, both of which could be traced back to custom menu entries I'd created while using 10.04. If you're missing an icon in your taskbar or launcher, for instance, and you did an upgrade instead of a fresh install, you might want to launch the old menu editor and see if you used some fancy custom icon back in the day; resetting the icon may fix your problem when you reboot. Similarly, deleting duplicate menu entries using the old menu editor may get rid of redundant launcher entries. Couldn't tell you why, just that it's mostly worked for me. And Banshee seems to be crashing a bit much for some reason.



There's also been some little things missing here and there. I cannot get the fancy eye-candy Alt-Tab switcher to work (I only get the old bleh one), and there are a few other things missing that seem to work alright on the netbook installation. There are also some customizations and tweaks I'm working on here and there, and it's just like me to go and want to muck things up for the sake of "personalization". But I'm not unhappy yet, is the big thing, and I do have to hand it to Canonical that this is mostly proving to be a far better user experience than, say for instance, any experience I've had with That One Operating System (You Know The One) Made By That Company In Redmond.

In fact, there's really only one major problem, come to think of it....

I've solved a lot of the tweaks and little issues like getting the ATI card working properly again. I've downloaded a few extras and mods to make things more functional and to customize a little bit of this and that. Which means I'm just about done, or as mostly-done as anyone ever is who likes to tweak and poke their computer's OS and interface....

Oh gods. I've totally fucked myself, haven't I?

I'm going to have to start writing again.