Mesanna's Weblog

Gosh, who would have thought my new operating system could provide so much entertainment!

I’m not one of these people who just installs an operating system and leaves it at that. You know, the kind of person who just USES their computer for … oh, I don’t know, maybe internet access and email, word processing, gaming, whatever. Nah, to hell with that. I’ve got to poke and poke and poke at it until it breaks. Then I try to fix it.

Apart from some web design and a LOT of idle surfing, I’ve come to the conclusion that I actually waste more time messing about with my OS, installing/uninstalling software, and tweaking everything until it can be tweaked no more, than I do actually being productive on the machine. Ah well, it’s all good, clean fun (most of the time)!

I was going great guns with Ubuntu. I sorted out my irregular mouse buttons (which I intend to blog about as a reminder to ME for when I next break my machine)! I fixed my sound issues, the problem with Firefox crashing when playing Flash videos, I installed every codec under the sun, tried out various web editors and even got quite used to The Gimp. Everything was going well until I decided to install KDE.

I recently bought an EEE-PC (which I adore) and it ships with a customized version of Xandros as the OS. I switched from the default “Kiddie mode” to the advanced desktop, which runs KDE. I quite liked the feel of it, so decided to give it a go in Ubuntu. I fired up the terminal and started downloading it when I got an error saying that my hard drive was full. Full?! Already?! And it all went rapidly downhill from there.

When I first decided to install Ubuntu, I created a partition for it of approx. 25Gb in size. After creating partitions for the Swap and the Home folders, I had about 9Gb left give or take for /root. Given that my C drive in Windows, including all my programs, only took up about 11Gb I figured this would be plenty to start off with. Now God only know what I did (maybe it was all those codecs), but I managed to completely fill this in the space of about 2 weeks!! I believe the KDE download is pretty large (i.e. a few hundred Mb’s) and that just killed it completely.

I’m guessing the KDE packages either buggered up Gnome, or it just couldn’t run properly with 0Kb space (and who can blame it for that). I restarted and tried to log in, trying all the recovery options, but errors were popping up everywhere. I managed to boot to a Command Line (like a hard-core Linux geek) and deleted some files from there to free up space. I also deleted some Gnome files which I understood would reset my Gnome preferences to default. I did manage to log in again, but Ubuntu was not a happy chappy. I tried to open Synaptic, both from the Terminal and in the GUI, in order to uninstall some software, but it just crashed and more errors filled the screen. Yay for me, I broke Linux

Since I (many, many moons ago) learned the wisdom of saving ALL my data on a different partition, I knew I could just wipe the OS and start again. Sometimes, you spend so much time trying to research the cause or solution of problems and, in the end, it’s just simpler to format and reinstall. So that’s what I did. However, this being me, nothing is ever straightforward. If there’s a right way, a wrong way, and a completely idiotic way to do something, guess which I will accidentally choose …..

More in my next post.