Lesson Learned - Ubuntu

I've clearly been using windows too much. Despite warnings from my friend/mentor, my issues this weekend were my own fault. I accepted full responsibility for my ignorance surrounding the actions taken.

Saturday, my Ubuntu 8.04 machine notified me that i had "critical security updates." No new kernel. Some of the updates were for VIM which made me "wtf" and look closely at what was being offered. It was mostly libs and so i grabbed them blindly. After system restart, sound was no longer working and Pidgin would freeze as it loaded. Much like winXP and SP2, unexpected things broke.

I tried looking through forums about updates, sound, and Pidgin breaking for others but no luck. This being a new build, i opted for the fix that was the most drastic but would get me up and running quickest. Upgrade to 8.10 time!

No luck. My machine felt laggy and hesitated a lot more AND sound was still broken. So much for that idea. All that's left was to reinstall. After consulting with a friend, i had a better game plan as to how i would configure my setup.

Previously i had left the install as vanilla as possible and so everything was on one partition which means everything would be lost. I was advised to create a separate partition for /home which would mean i wouldn't lose my files again. What a novel idea! As i was in the partition manager during install, it dawned on me that i can have /home be a separate drive and so i plugged in a spare 40g sata drive. When all was said and done, the mount point for / would become the 40g drive and 1.5tb would be allocated to /home. Let the install begin!

Install was no problem. Everything was working fine. Success. Wait a minute. I can't leave a sleeping beast alone, can i?

Yesterday I reinstalled again blowing away all system files while keeping /home on the seperate drive. During install it found /home no problem and asked if i wanted to import the data and settings from there. Sure. Why not?

After install was completed and i logged in, my background and files were intact. Woohoo! It makes sense that all of these files and settings exist in /home and since that was untouched then everything should look the same again (excluding lack of programs). Just because it makes sense doesn't mean that I'll truly grasp it until the first time i do it though.

If not for me blindly trusting the "updates", i feel i wouldn't have learned this tidbit for a long time. It's refreshing to have a sense of safety now knowing that whatever i wind up having in /home will remain intact after cleaning up yet another mess. I was genuinely pissed when that sound issue arose. Rather than whine and complain and get bitter about it, i used it as an excuse to try something new and different. Today i sit here knowing that i have absorbed another piece of the puzzle that i'm trying to conquer in my spare time.

Now... I need a beer BADLY!!! :)