09:29 – Barbara’s dad seems to be settling in okay at the nursing home. Barbara just left to run errands and then meet her sister over at their parents’ apartment. They plan to give it a good clean while it’s unoccupied. Their mom should be released from the hospital early next week, and as things stand now she’s planning to return to their apartment rather than relocate to an assisted living facility.
I gave up on Linux Mint yesterday, although it’s still running on Barbara’s office system. While my new hex-core system was sitting on the kitchen table, I’d installed Linux Mint on it. Other than the fact that it wasn’t connected to the Internet, everything was working properly. Yesterday, I set it up on my main desk in my office, beside the current system.
I started the new system, and it came up to a login prompt. I entered my username and password, and it told me the username or password was incorrect. Say what? So I entered them again. Same deal. So I entered them again, this time typing them out with one finger, just to make sure. Same deal. Shit. So I rebooted from the Linux Mint 13 64-bit DVD and re-installed. When the installation finished and the system rebooted to a login prompt, I entered the username and password I’d just entered. It came back to the login prompt, telling me the username/password was incorrect. Double shit. So I re-re-installed Linux Mint. Same deal.
Other than plugging in an Ethernet cable, the only change between that system sitting on the kitchen table and it sitting on my desk was that in the kitchen I had the display connected via the analog cable while in the office I used the digital cable. So I shut the system down, disconnected the digital cable, reconnected the analog cable, and restarted. Same problem. It wouldn’t accept my password. So I re-re-re-installed Linux Mint. Same deal. It simply wouldn’t let me log in. So I downloaded Kubuntu 12.04 LTS, burned a disc, and re-re-re-re-installed. It came up with no problems and is working normally. Well, except for the fact that the same thing that happened when I tried to migrate Barbara’s mail and contacts to her new system happened again when I tried to migrate my mail and contacts to my new system. Mail and contacts from earlier versions of Kontact/Kmail/Korganizer simply refuse to import into the current version.
For Barbara, that sucked but wasn’t a huge issue. She just doesn’t have much important old mail and her list of contacts is pretty small. For me, it’s a major issue because I have thousands of old mail messages to migrate over and probably 1,500 or more contacts. Also, my contacts have embedded information such as which kit(s) they bought. I really don’t want to lose that information or have to recreate it. So I’ll spend some serious time and effort to get that information migrated. I think I’m going to bag Kontact/Kmail/Korganizer completely and move to Thunderbird, assuming its contact management abilities are up to the task.