I twisted my neck funny earlier this week, and since then have had intermittent neck pain and nearly constant back-of-the-head headaches. If you haven’t heard from me here, that’s mainly the reason. Things are better now, but this neck thing is a serious issue. It doesn’t take much to much to set it off, and alas, flying kites and looking at the stars have both been implicated.<\/p>\n
The pain hasn’t allowed me to get much writing done this week, but I did decide to take a chance and do an early upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala. I usually let new major releases of OSes cook for a few weeks so that somebody else will spot the obvious bugs and fix them before I put my own arse in the line of fire. In this case, my neck hurt so bad that my arse didn’t care, and I said, Make it so, #2.<\/p>\n
Others have complained of problems with 9.10<\/a>, so I was gritting my teeth a little as the process proceeded. It took about three hours, but the install went without incident, as had upgrades to 9.04 and 8.10 previously. When nothing obvious blew up, I then spent a couple of hours just trying things: Showing videos, listening to MP3s, playing games, opening documents and spreadsheets, and so on. Having declared the upgrade good, I tried to run KGrubEditor<\/a>…and realized that it was gone. Its icon was blank, and double-clicking on it did nothing. Apparently the upgrade from Jaunty to Karmic uninstalled KGrubEditor without asking me, leaving me an empty launcher on the desktop.<\/p>\n I thought this might have had something to do with Ubuntu’s moving from Grub to Grub 2 with the 9.10 release, but that’s true only for new installs: Upgrades to 9.10 leave Grub in place and only update menu.lst. So I don’t know why it happened, and I remain a little annoyed. Grub should already have a GUI settings manager\/applet in the Administration menu; it shouldn’t be up to some guy to write an independent app to do the job. Editing menu.lst is one of the things I do so rarely that I don’t get good at it, which is precisely why GUI settings editors are necessary.<\/p>\n KGrubEditor is nowhere in the list of apps available through the Synaptic Package Manager, and when I tried to add the KDE4 PPA repository containing KGrubEditor, Synaptic could not access it for some reason. (It may have been an old URL; I’m not an ace at such things and don’t know how to be sure.) I eventually just went up and downloaded the damned thing manually and installed it, but the app can’t find its OS icons and doesn’t correctly set the default boot menu item. I guess I have to uninstall it and reinstall it, but I’ve killed enough time on it this weekend and will leave that task for later.<\/p>\n The takeaway is simple: As good as Ubuntu Linux is, it still has some gaping holes, and bootloader settings management is at the top of that regrettable list.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I twisted my neck funny earlier this week, and since then have had intermittent neck pain and nearly constant back-of-the-head headaches. If you haven’t heard from me here, that’s mainly the reason. Things are better now, but this neck thing is a serious issue. It doesn’t take much to much to set it off, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[59,14],"class_list":["post-993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-linux","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/993\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}