Rain, Linux, and a Headcold

So it’s Friday and I’m staying home from work to recover from a rather out-of-proportion head cold. It’s raining all day, absolutely miserable (i.e. lovely Scottish weather), which only contributes to my desire to stay inside. What to do on such a day? Well, the obvious thing is to tackle the small pile of work I’ve got queued up — finish a pair of experiment designs and read a couple papers. Of course — I reason to myself — I don’t think very well when I’m sick/medicated. And so off I go, merrily installing Linux instead. What else is an honest geek got to do on a rainy Friday afternoon, really?

Didn’t I have a perfectly functional desktop, you ask? Why would I need to go around, wiping hard drives and installing slightly newer kernels? Jaunty Jackalope, of course. I figure I’m culturally obligated to install operating systems named after quasi-mythological Southwestern creatures. Apparently doing a dist-upgrade (or update-manager -d, whatever) is less broken than the past (i.e., it isn’t completely braindead) — but it still left me with a terminally unbootable system. Argh. Ah, well. If I weren’t OK with a little mild data loss I’d have gone crazy years ago. A fresh install from a 9.04-desktop image worked like a charm.

Miracles!

So, several happily uneventful hours later, here I am — posting this from a shiny new Ubuntu 9.04, XFCE 4.6, compiz-enabled, keyboard-customized linux desktop. Color me happy. Even managed to get EVE running under WINE without too much trouble. Not that that’s a good thing, really.