A few nights ago, I upgraded to the latest Dapper beta for Kubuntu. After a failed attempt last week at doing a dist-upgrade to Flight 6 that caused all kinds of catastrophic errors and having to wipe and reinstall Breezy 5.10 (thankfully I had the presence of mind to make a backup of my home folder), I decided to just do a clean install from CD. I already had pretty much everything backed up and there was really nothing to lose and hey, it’s Beta, right?

While I realize that I spoiled my geeky Xmas morning delight of being able to upgrade to Dapper final on June 1st, fuck it. I’ve always hated waiting for goodies and shee-it, the move was totally worth my while. Dapper is hot.

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It’s very frustrating when I can’t get a program from my Linux distro’s repositories. Ubuntu and Kubuntu share the same repos and while there’s a huge array of applications available there, not everything makes it and I’m forced to choose between going without or slogging through compiling the application from source which is something I can do, but I’m totally uncomfortable with. Using apt-get with the correct repositories is safe, fun and leaves me slightly giddy at the sheer glut of shit I can access for free. Compiling from source, meddling with dependencies and running the risk of breaking something, while a really good feeling when all goes well, more often than not drives me up the wall. Maybe in a few more years I’ll scoff at the challenges of wrangling source tarballs, but until then, I’ll take the repos, please.

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This week, I decided to play mad genius and attempt a dual installation of Linux and Windows on my main computer. I already run Linux on my old computer, but it’s slow and I wanted to see what it would do on my souped up beast of a machine and besides, other than video games, Windoze sucks armadillo balls. I only keep it around because I’m a video game junkie and it’s just easier for me to boot up XP than deal with trying to get a game to run on Linux.

I’ve been using the Ubuntu distribution of Linux for about a year now and I decided I would stick with it for this install. I like it,but will admit that my experience with other packages is minimal. I’m definitely not one of those guys that after many long years of trying every flavor of Linux, thought really deeply and settled on one. Ubuntu works pretty good for me, at least so far.

No problem for a daring genius like myself, I thought. I have two hard drives in my main PC, so I figured I’d leave the one with XP installed on it alone, clean off the other, format and install Linux on it. This way, if there were any problems, my system and my files would remain intact on the main drive. No need for any real backing up, right?

Wrong. So very seriously wrong. Sometimes I can be such an overeager hairless chimp of a fucking retard.

In an effort to keep a long and boring story short, I’ll cut to the basics. I fucked up. I tried again and fucked that up as well. I ended up with Linux completely screwed and waking up next to grandma, buck naked as well as being unable to boot XP. After taking some advice from a support forum, I attempted a Windows repair. However, instead of repairing, it completely fucked me, resulting in a permanent blue screen of death.

So there I was with no working operating system, completely screwed for not having done a proper backup. For several minutes, I contemplated jamming my keyboard up my nose, strangling myself with the mouse cord or shoving my head through my monitor. I had five years worth of photos trapped in there, along with all my game save files. Horror!

Luckily, I had the poise to download and run a live CD so I could boot Linux and run it from the disc drive. I ran a little script called winmac_fstab that searches for and mounts NTFS drives or partitions. Bazoom! I had access to my files. XP is so fucking unsecure. It took me five seconds to bypass my login completely and get at my user folder, or any other folder I needed.

Armed with a USB flash drive, I reenacted the fall of Saigon and evacuated as many files as I could and pretty much got everything out and safely stored on a different computer. Finally, after rescuing everything important, I completely wiped both drives and tried again…and again…and yet again. All told, I think I ended up wiping my PC about three times.

Then, as if sent from a higher power, a thought came into my thick skull: Why not look for a fucking tutorial, you stupid fucking renegade herpes sore?

A minute or two of searching Google brought me to this tutorial on dual installing Ubuntu and Windows. I reinstalled XP and with the help of this rescue CD, resized the partition, leaving about 10 gigs of free space which I subsequently installed Linux into. It worked perfectly.

I now have the glorious experience of being asked which operating system I wish to boot, every time I turn on my computer. I can laugh my most evil laugh and say no to Windoze every time. Ubuntu loads and runs about ten times faster than XP and so far works great. All is well and back to normal. Next time, I swear I’ll consult a tutorial first.