08:40 – I’m now running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on my main system. At the moment, I don’t care much for it–they seem to take pleasure in making simple things difficult–but it’s supported for five years and I’m sure I’ll get used to it. Fortunately, the Firefox and Thunderbird data transferred seamlessly. I just fired them both up and was back where I was.
Linux Mint 15 shot craps on me late yesterday afternoon. Suddenly I had no network connection. At first, I thought our Internet connection was down, but it wasn’t. So I rebooted the system, and it still didn’t work. At that point, I began to think that the Ethernet adapter had died. Only a couple days ago, I’d downloaded the ISO for Ubuntu 14.04, so I stuck the DVD in the drive and rebooted again. Ubuntu came up in try-before-you-buy mode, and was able to access the Internet with no problem. Okay, enough of Linux Mint, which has always been flaky anyway.
I had multiple recent backups, both to external hard drive and USB flash sticks, but I decided to pull another full copy to another hard drive. That ran overnight. This morning, I disconnected the external hard drive, rebooted the system to the Ubuntu 14.04 DVD, and installed. That took only a few minutes, and I was up and running. I still have to transfer over the bulk of my data, get printers configured, and so on, but on balance I’m glad to be back on Ubuntu.
Kit-wise, this has gone from a slowish month to a reasonable one, all because we just got an order for 30 CK01A chemistry kits from a Florida state university. Unfortunately, we have only a couple dozen of those kits in stock at the moment, so I’m just going to build another batch of 30 specifically for this order.