On the 21st I had bought an LCD monitor for my desktop. It's a nice 19" widescreen Syncmaster 943NW. When I reached home, I encountered 2 problems with it. Firstly, the hinge on the stand just couldn't move. I couldn't adjust the viewing angle, which is frustrating. Secondly, Debian Etch refused to correctly display the native resolution. It works fine in the latest Ubuntu, so it had to be my X server being too ancient.
The solution is simple, in theory. All I had to do was return the stand thing to the shop to have it replaced, and then upgrade Debian from Etch to Lenny. I went to the shop first. The sales attendant did offer to replace or repair the stand, and it'd take 2 weeks (although he frowned at the thought of having to do this for me). My LCD monitor is now in a box and is unusable for the next 2 weeks.
Next was the problem of upgrading Debian. The official way to do this is to change all references of
etch to lenny in the sources.list file. Then just do an apt-get update and an apt-get dist-upgrade. Simple, right? What could go wrong? Apparently, plenty. The installed borked, and now I can't even login. Rather than spending hours to try to fix the problem, I just decided to wipe my root directory and install from a beta Lenny CD. However, the process of downloading updates to Lenny on this awful Malaysian internet line is estimated to take more than eight hours. Right now I'm just waiting for it to be done while typing this entry on a Mac, eating pizza. I love the pizza delivery service. At least that works right. Here's a safety tip though, the soda that the pizza guy delivers is going to be well shaken on the bike ride to your house. Opening it may lead to fizzy stuff flying everywhere.
My cat's asleep. I had to write this blog entry on my own. Sigh. It hasn't been a good week at all.
1 comment:
That's the advantage of using Windows or OS X ;) I've given up on Linux, apart from running calculations on servers that I don't need to maintain. Too much fuss to make stuff work.
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