[SLL] All my 64bit Ubuntu's stopped booting...so far my 32bit UbuntuME still goes

[Robert Woodcock]

On Thu, Dec 20, 2007 at 12:30:47PM -0800, Chuck Wolber wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Dec 2007, Howard Gibson wrote:
> >    With my Linux boxes, I have a three hour rule.  If I cannot fix a 
> > Linux box in well below three hours, I reformat the root partition and 
> > re-install everything.  The Linux install takes three hours.  The beauty 
> > of Free Software is that I have the install media, and there are no 
> > licensing issues.
>
> [...]
> 
> 1. Persist with a problem, solve it once and then push a fix (or 
> suggestion) upstream. Even if the OSS project ignores your input, Google 
> will make sure it's available to others.
> 
> 2. If you don't solve it in 3 hours, reinstall and don't waste time making 
> the community aware of the problem.

Also, regardless of what software you are using, there are some truisms at
work:

* Computers are deterministic. They will do the same thing every time,
  regardless of whether that thing is correct or incorrect.

* If the software is violating the principle of least surprise, THAT IS A
  BUG in the software.

* Software is full of bugs. For large pieces of software such as Linux or
  Windows plus a usable set of applications, you're talking about several
  hundred thousand known, reported, documented bugs and probably well over a
  million ones that you're lucky enough to be the very first one to find.

* A lot of bugs are triggered only under certain circumstances (hopefully
  the ones that were triggered under all circumstances were caught in
  testing - but don't count on that either.)

* If you do a reinstall, the software you are reinstalling contains the same
  set of bugs which will get triggered if you recreate those same
  circumstances.

* Those circumstances may or may not include the versions of other programs
  the software interfaces with, the configuration the software is using, the
  way the user is doing a particular task, etc.

By choosing to reinstall, you're saying to yourself one of two things:

* I so totally botched my config files/registry/whatever that reconfiguring
  it over from scratch *has* to result in something my software can make
  better sense of than any manual fix I could make.

* My hardware is unstable, and if I blindly overwrite something that's
  corrupted with a known good copy, maybe it'll stay uncorrupted until the
  right person reads my resume.
-- 
Robert Woodcock - rcw at blarg.net
"The negative character of thermodynamics laws does nothing but stifle and
discourage creative and inventive minds from the quest for perpetual motion
machines."
	-- Ken Amis