Power failure during upgrade

[Ganelon]

Well, the title pretty much covers it. I decided to finally upgrade from Karmic to Lucid, and there was a power failure right during the part you can't cancel out of. Not like we get a lot of power failures here, so the odds were about astronomical against it being at that moment. After the power came back on and I'd spent a couple hours trying to get things sorted back out, I decided to throw in the towel and just pull some files and do a clean install. Since it was going to be a clean install, I figured 'in for a penny, in for a pound' and went for Natty rather than Lucid.

Natty Narwhal actually looks and runs pretty good so far. Oolite runs fine on it. Among the files I rescued were my addons folder and my savegames, so I should be fine. Well, at least after I get the Narwhal to recognize joystick and controllers.

[DaddyHoggy]

Well, the title pretty much covers it. I decided to finally upgrade from Karmic to Lucid, and there was a power failure right during the part you can't cancel out of. Not like we get a lot of power failures here, so the odds were about astronomical against it being at that moment. After the power came back on and I'd spent a couple hours trying to get things sorted back out, I decided to throw in the towel and just pull some files and do a clean install. Since it was going to be a clean install, I figured 'in for a penny, in for a pound' and went for Natty rather than Lucid.

Natty Narwhal actually looks and runs pretty good so far. Oolite runs fine on it. Among the files I rescued were my addons folder and my savegames, so I should be fine. Well, at least after I get the Narwhal to recognize joystick and controllers.

eek! That's always been my fear of an Ubuntu upgrade. (I used to back up my HD first) but now my main drive is bigger than all my spare drives that I could back up to - so it's a worry.

However, if you can post back later and confirm all is well with Natty I may buy a fresh HD and rebuild my dual-boot Ubuntu/XP machine.

[Ganelon]

I had a computer instructor years ago who told us to lay in a bottle of champagne that cost at least 50$ and a single champagne glass that cost at least 10$. Keep them stashed somewhere, and when your hard drive finally dies in a non-recoverable sort of way you crack open the champagne and take the rest of the day off. He claimed you may as well celebrate, since it's bound to happen sooner or later. LOL

However, in quite a few years of computing, I've only ever had one hard drive actually fail to the point where I couldn't even grab the most wanted of my data off it, and this wasn't that bad. The drive itself was still fine, it was just the OS that was messed.

I've never been fond of champagne, though, so when the power went out I settled for brewing a pot of a nice handpicked whole beam Indonesian "flores" coffee and raiding the pantry for a few squares of some Swiss chocolate. A little after I was done with that, the power came back on and I was able to try the system. No go. It failed out and it was more than Ubuntu's autorepair routines could recover easily. I managed to get at least a command line after a bit of fussing and trying things I could find online (other machines in the house hadn't been being updated and were fine, fortunately). I could see the accounts and folders were still intact, and by then I knew most of what I'd really rather not lose. I'm pretty sure I could have gotten it up and limping along and fixed it, if I'd wanted to put in more time on it. But I figured I also might be still fixing things here and there a year from now after that sort of a crash during the upgrade. Sometimes it's just common sense to grab the ship's safe and hit for the escape pod. LOL

Took about a half hour to dl the iso and burn an install CD, and then I used that in demo mode to go in and pull off the files and folders I wanted before going ahead with the wipe and clean install. Not that big a trauma. Like i said, I've got pretty much everything working except the game controllers, and there I can see them with lsmod in terminal mode, so it's just going to be a matter of getting the system to talk with them again.

I ran Oolite for a couple hours "right out of the box", though, with keyboard controls and no OXPs. Nice to do that once in a while anyway and refresh one's memory on what it is like to be a Jameson with 100 cr and a starter Cobra MKIII. All the basics ran well on Natty, so I don't have too many worries. So far, I rather like Natty. The Unity desktop/GUI took a little exploring to figure out, but I rather like it already after an evening of getting used to it. I don't think I have a lot of use for the "cloud" or enhanced "mobile" capabilities, but it seems like a good OS so far.

[CommonSenseOTB]

My condolences Ganelon. Makes me feel better owning a laptop. Just unplug it during storms and no worries.

[Ganelon]

Making progress. It was pretty easy to get Natty to read USB based joystick, so I have my lower control panel back and can use a gamepad for flight controls. I'm not a gamepad sort of person for Oolite, but I must say it's not a bad controller choice for this game. I hadn't expected the precision toggle to be available for it, since the D-pad on it isn't analog, but that was a pleasant surprise.

My Nostromo and the overhead panel both read as USB keyboards, so Natty hadn't been having a problem with them in the first place. Everything USB came right up after an lsmod to find out what Natty was calling it and then doing a modprobe. Most of it didn't even need that, just the gamepad. So if a person is using a USB joystick, then Natty is probably "all systems go" right off. But I want my soundcard based gameport for the older joystick that I really like.

My favourite stick is an old Microsoft Sidewinder Precision Pro. Since I jack that in via an old SBLIve! card, I didn't really expect Natty to manage that without a bit of tinkering. On the bright side, though, the stick is self-calibrating, so I don't have to mess with calibration or dead zones with any version of Ubuntu or any flight or space sim software I've ever used. Once the system can read it and I tell the software which axis I want for what, it has always been ready to roll right there.

So Natty has been mostly working out well, and most of the hassles I've run into are due to a rather eclectic assortment of controllers more than any shortcoming with the OS.

[Ganelon]

Got it. I just needed to add a few lines to the /etc/modules file to get the system to load the gameport and stick at startup.

All shiny now. Everything is working fine.

[DaddyHoggy]

Excellent! Thanks for the update on your update!

[fronclynne]

Makes me feel better owning a laptop. Just unplug it during storms and no worries.

Built in UPS, surge supressor; what's not to like? Oh yeah, the 1.5 to 10x cost multiplier. >:(

[CommonSenseOTB]

Makes me feel better owning a laptop. Just unplug it during storms and no worries.

Built in UPS, surge supressor; what's not to like? Oh yeah, the 1.5 to 10x cost multiplier. >:(

Acer netbook $270 tax in 1.5 yrs ago....cheapest solution out there.