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torquillThis has been the last 24 hours for me.
I did manage to fix my laptop, fortunately, but not exactly the way I would have liked.
The story, in brief: I upgraded from firefox 3.5 to 3.5.1. I suddenly couldn't log into facebook (it wouldn't complete the login process). So I took out 3.5.1, but I couldn't downgrade gracefully by the upgrade script I was using, and the only one available to me from the software repository was 3.0. I (foolishly) grabbed 3.5 from the next release of the operating system (Ubuntu Jaunty), along with a few dependencies I thought were minor. It broke some library. So I reversed the process, in the hope that I could restore things to normal.
By the end of that, I had a system which couldn't complete loading X windows, couldn't access external hard drives, and would take keyboard input only on the first text console (of six). I had essentially a text-only system with one prompt available. Oops.
So I gave up, and today I burned CDs of Jaunty and backed up my files. I learned that the liveCD could access both the hard drive and the external drives (that made a full backup possible!) and that if you ask it not to format the existing partitions from an earlier release, it keeps many things intact without the instability that seems to come from a live upgrade (upgrading via the package manager while you're running the system). I didn't have to use any of my backups, though I was glad to have them.
I reinstalled a few programs that went missing, rescued Propaganda from an old archive (whew!) and placed it in my home directory to avoid losing it in future, dealt with a few quirks, and now it seems fine. And I have a current version of the operating system. Yay!
...except that I still can't log in to facebook. I need to test whether it's my account, rather than the browser. Still, it makes all of this a little ironic.
Edit: I solved the Facebook problem, by dint of the classic strategy: install a Firefox debugger and try to reproduce the problem. Voila, I can log in!
I did manage to fix my laptop, fortunately, but not exactly the way I would have liked.
The story, in brief: I upgraded from firefox 3.5 to 3.5.1. I suddenly couldn't log into facebook (it wouldn't complete the login process). So I took out 3.5.1, but I couldn't downgrade gracefully by the upgrade script I was using, and the only one available to me from the software repository was 3.0. I (foolishly) grabbed 3.5 from the next release of the operating system (Ubuntu Jaunty), along with a few dependencies I thought were minor. It broke some library. So I reversed the process, in the hope that I could restore things to normal.
By the end of that, I had a system which couldn't complete loading X windows, couldn't access external hard drives, and would take keyboard input only on the first text console (of six). I had essentially a text-only system with one prompt available. Oops.
So I gave up, and today I burned CDs of Jaunty and backed up my files. I learned that the liveCD could access both the hard drive and the external drives (that made a full backup possible!) and that if you ask it not to format the existing partitions from an earlier release, it keeps many things intact without the instability that seems to come from a live upgrade (upgrading via the package manager while you're running the system). I didn't have to use any of my backups, though I was glad to have them.
I reinstalled a few programs that went missing, rescued Propaganda from an old archive (whew!) and placed it in my home directory to avoid losing it in future, dealt with a few quirks, and now it seems fine. And I have a current version of the operating system. Yay!
...except that I still can't log in to facebook. I need to test whether it's my account, rather than the browser. Still, it makes all of this a little ironic.
Edit: I solved the Facebook problem, by dint of the classic strategy: install a Firefox debugger and try to reproduce the problem. Voila, I can log in!
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no subject
Date: 2009-07-23 19:14 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-23 21:14 (UTC)I have heard from some people that you can get a stable system from live upgrade, too, so I can't extrapolate whether no-format is better than live upgrade based on one data point. It seems at least as good, though.