About noon, I was working on the most recent version of the Iron Furnace model, when Inkscape crashed. Since the same bug had been showing up for several days, I decided to find the problem before continuing.
The Inkscape bug list showed the issue I had been having and it has been fixed in the latest version. Since I didn’t want to update right now, for several reasons, I decided to go ahead with editing the instruction file and working on the how-to pictures.
Then it happened… [muttering vague obscenities] While downloading some files, I was also moving around some pretty large graphics, the system came to a screeching halt!
I gave it a few minutes to clear itself, but it was hosed. So, I turned it off, got a drink and turned it back on. It came back to the login prompt, but any attempt to login caused a garbled screen and another lockup. One or more of the critical system files had been trashed.
I suppose I could have taken my time, poked around at the command-line level and solved the issue, but I was past the point of being ticked off. I just wanted my dang computer back, so I could wrap up this project!
So, I grabbed my laptop, logged onto the net and downloaded the latest version (10.10) of Kubuntu. Then, I pulled another hard drive from my stack of spares, installed it as the primary, un-plugged the old drive and installed the new operating system. That took about a half hour.
The good news is that when I installed Inkscape on my new system, it’s the latest 0.48 build, so I shouldn’t ever have to deal with that problem again.
Once it came up and everything appeared to work as planned, I shut it off, plugged the old drive back in as a secondary and rebooted the system.
All of my old data is still there on the old drive. So, now I’m waiting for at least four or five hours while the system copies more than 1.3Tb of data from the old hard drive to the new one.
In the meantime, I’m going to update this blog, catch up on some email and then read a good book.
Post Orbital Design 