Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish

I never got the chance to meet Douglas Adams, and never got to tell him how much I enjoyed his books. I'm hoping that he won't mind my use of a line from his book as the title for this post.
This was, apparently, the last thing the dolphins said to mankind just before the Earth was destroyed by the Vogon constructor fleet. If you want to know more, you need to read the trilogy in five parts.
Although I would enjoy talking about the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy universe, that's not what I'm going to vent about today.
I've been a happy user of Ubuntu for several years now, I don't even remember the version that I first used and have upgraded to the latest and greatest versions. I will admit to the occasional difficult install and having to do a fresh reinstall and recovering my files from backups.
I'm not even complaining about the new Unity interface: although I wasn't fond of it, I could become used to the different layout over time.
I got used to having the window buttons on the left (after all, that's where they are on my macbook). Even more amusing, after I found out how to put them back on the right, after a few days I reverted back to the "official" new Ubuntu position.
However, the 11.10 release just doesn't do it for me.
I tried performing the distribution update (which took quite some time) and rebooted to find the machine wouldn't boot. At all.
Thinking how glad I was that I had made a full backup, and copied my files to another drive I downloaded the ISO and burned to CD. Rebooted to find myself stuck in the Grub recovery mode and unable to persuade it to boot for me.
No worries, I thought, I burned a 11.04 build and booted from that. Also to find myself looking at Grub recovery. So I created a usb boot drive with 11.10 and booted successfully from that.
I copied my important files back to my partition, switched to dual monitors to find the desktop background white, and Firefox also was pure white.
Rebooted, and all seemed to be fine. Except that every now and again a window (Firefox, Nautilus or empathy) would become all white. Sometimes adjusting the size of the window helped, but often it made no difference until a reboot.
This morning, after leaving the machine on downloading podcasts, I was not able to log back on. ssh also wouldn't connect, so another reboot to see...
Nothing. A blank screen.
ssh'ing in gave me a desktop and access to nautilus, but not clue why the display on the laptop would co-operate and let me access email or the web.
So the point of all this rambling is to say goodbye to Ubuntu. Although it is interesting tracking down why applications misbehave, and at the moment I seem to have more time on my hands than I'm used to, what I really need from a machine is to reliably boot and let me get on with life.
It looks like I'm going to be spending some time hunting for a new distro to live with, and I suspect that I'm starting with Debian - my macbook is busy creating the flashdrive boot image for me and then I'm going to have the fun of learning a new distribution...

Backups and upgrades

I am taking the (big) risk of doing an update on my main laptop in upgrading it to Ubuntu 11.10.

Out of paranoia (and because I had a problem with the filesystem recently), I decided to do  a full backup of my home directory first.

Two days later the backup was complete. Not surprisingly, I had done some work on the machine and needed to do a backup again, but this time I just backed up the files that have changed.

Today is the big day: starting the upgrade process. I found it amusing that it might take some time to download the updates. Only might?

Currently using my MacBook, and (as always) it is taking me a while to get used to the different key layout.

It takes a little while to reprogram my muscle memory into finding the ~, | and # keys again. I am never sure if Apple actually looked at a UK keyboard before setting up their keyboards, but it is most certainly not following the standard.

For those slightly less trusting than me, how do you know if a backup is successful? The only way I know is to do a restore. Comparing the backup to the original only says the files have the same contents, after all. It does not mean that the backup will be able to be restored to your machine.

My usual method for upgrades is to buy a new hard disk for the laptop, do a clean install then copy my files over onto the new install. This time I have bitten the bullet and went for a direct upgrade.