More trouble at the Linux Mill- seemed to be the same king of thing.

Programs seemed to stop working I went into a a virtual terminal and started getting weird error messages. I rebooted the system grub was a bit slow off the mark which is always worrying.

I tried going into normal boot but I got a strange console. I switched off at the box and started again opting to go into recovery mode. Same story as before - I had to run fsck manually (can't use -p and -a options).

Did lots of tapping yes wondering whether it was all worth it. And finally I tapped my last yes and I had a successful session so maybe it is fixed after all. Don't know if it really is and if it is I don't know how or why.

Twice in one day - a real bummer.

Will it won't it?

Is it back to the bad old days with the filesytem going really cranky?

Had a bad crash today. Bit ridiculous because I was only using gnome-terminal.

(I had done some other stuff- I had used gdeskbar which in turn
had opened firefox and beagle-searched the word diet. I am not entirely sure why
firefox was launched but for whatever reason it did it and I moved on to another virtual desktop
to practice the bash tricks I was reading about.)

I was reading some instructions on how to edit commands you can recall from history via
search history keys Ctrl-R. For some reason it wouldn't amend the bit I wanted it just crashed.- nothing would work I had to reboot from the box. I booted back into recovery mode and manually ran fsck after it had done a bit of its own stuff.

It then said reboot now so I entered reboot but it got stuck. I sought out some help
so tried reboot -h which turned out to be the magic command and it got
going again. How long have I been using it? Two months or something - it
was running really smoooth then throws that at the user. It fixed
itself fine -loads of stuff about inides I Had to type y a lot- I was hoping it would get better but another part of my brain was
asking "am I going to have to backup and reinstall again?" That would be really
annoying if it was my only box. I can imagine how a total newbie would feel - in fact I can remember the horror easily. After all its not that long ago.

gdeskbar gnome linux

Vim

Have I mentioned that part of my Linuxification of XP involved installed the Windows version of vim. I think I have it installed at least twice because it appears in Cygwin too (the ultimate Linuxification...it is the Unix shell emulator)Essentially the whole thing is a bit nuts. It's a text editor that uses various modes - you go into one mode to write your text and another to do your editing. This frees up the keyboard so that a whole stream of short editing commands can be brought into use.

Vim-users love to talk of its power and I can see the potential but the draw back is remebering the various commands...you've also got to be a bit aware of whether the Caps lock has been hit or it will start acting rather strangely. I type away happily and all of a sudden find that something is "recording" or the cursor is jumping off somewhere and the text simply isn't appearing

It is getting a bit more easy to use. It certainly makes a change from Notepad. A long time ago I got into Notetab Lite - that also had a load of features but I never bothered to read them and its true editors are really a programmers tyope of thing. But I still like the speed of loading, amongst other things, that you get with text editors.

(I wrote this in Vim and had a bit of trouble trying to work out my commands to get into onto a clipboard to paste into blogger...got there in the end obviously)

A couple of things that helped with dual booting. One is the firefox del.icio.us extension. I can bookmark in either OS and can simply open firefox in either system to look at the same bookmarks. If course I can also add to them from IE7 using the normal del.icio.us buttons. At work I aahve to get IE^ to point at the del.icio.us homepage and log in and post manually. Bit long winded but nice interconnectivity going on their. I think they are on the Yahoo side of the divide.

Meanwhile google has grabbed Blogger.


The other co-habitation app is Ext2 IFS. It allows windows to have (almost) full read write access to my Ubuntu partition. This is really good. I can even use it to edit system files so it is better than having a shared FAT32 partition.

Today I created a text file with details of the football game I was going to. The printer wasn't working (haven't set it up so I rebooted into xp and opend the file with Notepad (I have the windows Vim so I could have used that)and printed from XP no problems at all. I could even download directly to Linux ifand in fact have done. (Seem to have better codec support in linux alternatively have some problems with certain files in Linux and can just open them with windows apps. great little bit of open source and very easy to use/set up.

Something that is irritating me is copy and paste in gnome (or it it gnu/linux as a whole?)

When i am doing one of my links on verbal diary it really irks if I try to do it with the mouse.

This link for example. I highlighted "this" a dialogue opens with a field to place the link in. When it opens it is preset to show http:// (which is blogger) and a small "newspaper icon" appears by the cursor and follows it around. I assume it must be a clipboard containing "this" (with linux highlighting puts the text on the clipboard - there is no need to right-click and choose copy). I try to get rid of http: (I am pasting the whole address ie "http://s67.photobucket.com/albums/h293/ecf1691/th_google_paste_search.png"...if I don't get rid of the http I will get http://http://s67.photobucket.com/albums...etc...

In my attempts to do this all of a sudden an unexpected address appears:the existing http:// followed by http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif. This seems to be...the location of the dialogue window or what...I haven't a clue.


In XP I would copy the address to the clipboard drag over the http use the del key to delete then I would right-click paste and job's done. The process in linux is even longer - my description above only gets me to the pasting of an incorrect address. It takes further wrangling to actually finish the job. On the whole I like the auto-copy and middle-click pasting you get with Linux. (I've heard it described as a unix convention so you probably do the same thing with Macs.) No doubt something similar is doable in XP through 3rd party software. I must scout around for it.

And what happens if I do link to that mystery address?