timake.com

I upgraded my Linux box to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, the Hardy Heron. The upgrade ran for several hours and then started giving me some errors trying to upgrade several packages, VirtualBox being one of them. Finally, I clicked OK on one error message telling me that the Update Manager was giving up, and it just ended with this cheerful dialog telling me that my box might be "unstable."

Yes, after I tried to run the Update Manager again, and it telling me that I had no more updates to apply, I rebooted the box. I wound up at a command prompt telling me that one of my partitions wouldn't mount. It was only my /home file system - nothing important there except all my files, music collection, all the digital photography I've taken since 2005, etc. (note to self: back this stuff up.)

After Stephen helped me out running fsck on it, fixing some errors, etc., I rebooted again, and this time, the x server loaded and everything was fine. I have upgraded through 4 different Ubuntu versions and they get progressively scarier as we go along. Although most Windows installations require you to rebuild your box every year, mine has gone 3+ years without that, thanks to Linux's superior architecture. It may, however, be getting time to install Ubuntu from scratch and start with a clean slate.

One of my problems is that I have installed forty bazillion packages on this box. I really need to go through and delete stuff that I don't use.

All in all, I still like Linux over Windows. Ubuntu rocks.